aerospace engineer at its branch at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, Texas. During this time, there were six Space Shuttle launches. "What impressed me", she later said, "was the whole idea that everybody was so into what they were doing and excited that each of their parts was so important." In December 1985, Caputo received orders to report to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida for flight training. By law, women were still banned from combat assignments, so half the jobs in the Navy were unavailable to women regardless of aptitude or ability, and there were doubts about the wisdom of training women for jobs they were not permitted to do. Getting accepted into flight training was a major achievement, and those women that did so were often resented by men who were passed over. Caputo completed primary flight training at Naval Air Station Pensacola on the T-2 Buckeye, T-39 Sabreliner and TA-4J Skyhawk and qualified as a naval flight officer (NFO) in June 1987. Caputo's NFO training continued at the Electronic Warfare School at Corry Station in preparation to fly electronic warfare aircraft. She then went to the Naval Air Station Lemoore, where she qualified to operate the electronic systems on the LTV EA-7L Corsair II. On April 6, 1988, she married an Annapolis classmate, Richard T. Nowak, at the Naval Academy Chapel with Catholic rites, and changed her last name to "Nowak". Her next assignment was to Electronic Warfare Aggressor Squadron 34 (VAQ-34) at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, California, where she flew on both the Corsair II and the Douglas ERA-3B Skywarrior, supporting the U.S. Pacific Fleet on reconnaissance mission exercises. She qualified as a mission commander and electronic warfare lead. In 1990, Nowak entered the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where she earned both a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in September 1992, writing a thesis on Computational Investigations of a NACA 0012 Airfoil in Low Reynolds Number Flows. She gave birth to a son in February 1992. After graduate school, she transferred to the restricted line as an Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer. She was selected to attend the United States Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, after she applied six times. She graduated in June 1994, and then became an aircraft systems project officer at the Air