Marjorie Trees Townsend (née Rhodes; March 12, 1930 – April 4, 2015) was an American electrical engineer, and the first woman to manage a spacecraft launch for NASA.

[1] Early in her career, Townsend worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and at the Naval Research Laboratory.

In time she was the first woman to become a spacecraft project manager at Goddard Spaceflight Center, responsible for Uhuru, the first satellite designed for x-ray astronomy.

[4] Townsend was co-inventor of a digital telemetry system, patented in 1968, which was part of the Nimbus program weather satellite.

[8] The Marjorie Rhodes Townsend Papers are held in the Special Collections library at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.