[3] While she was in high school, her family relocated to Titusville, Florida where her father worked at Cape Canaveral as an ordnance administrator in the U.S. Army's rocket program.

Immediately after graduating from high school in June 1958, she joined the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Cape Canaveral as a civilian engineering aide.

In her work as an engineering aide, Hardin had hands-on experience designing rocket launch computer systems for the initial NASA flight programs.

After Hardin earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at the Jacksonville State University in Alabama in 1963, she went to work for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center as an aerospace engineer.

[6][1] Morgan humorously notes that "for the first 15 years, I worked in a building where there wasn't a ladies' rest room," and "it was a big day in my book when there was one.