Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  A quiet girl, Sue was slow to make friends. She loved books, although her reading was excruciatingly slow. Writing was worst of all. She despised putting words on a page and went to any lengths to avoid it. The most natural way to avoid writing prose was to immerse herself in numbers instead. There were no embarrassing letters for her to unconsciously invert. Instead she reveled in the clear simplicity of numerals on a page.

  Although she was accomplished in math and science, it wasn’t where Sue envisioned her career. Grown into a stunning young woman, she began to model part-time. She walked up and down platforms in small department-store fashion shows, a smile plastered on her face as she showed off in dresses, skirts, and swimsuits.

  However, Sue didn’t aspire to be a model either. She enrolled at Scripps, a small women’s college tucked into the San Gabriel Valley, outside Los Angeles. Her chosen major was art, a subject whose chief attraction was that it promised little writing, and she dreamed of becoming an architect. Her major seemed to be fighting against her. She simply didn’t have artistic talent. What Sue didn’t struggle with was math. In fact, the math offered at Scripps was too basic for her. Instead, she decided to register for classes at Claremont, the men’s college next door. When she discovered that the first-semester calculus class was full, she signed up for second-semester calculus. How hard could it be?

  It turned out to be pretty hard. She had to learn both the differential equations she was being taught in class and the integral equations she had missed in the first semester. It was a giant leap in understanding. She was used to the tidy answers of algebra. Now she had to get used to producing an equation as the solution to a math problem. It was like answering a question with another question. The differential equations would cut the equations into small pieces while the integral equations sewed them back together. There was a reason they were taught separately; it was a lot to take in at once. She struggled, especially as she didn’t like studying and had never been a great student.

  Because of this, she wasn’t surprised when she got a C, but it didn’t stop her from signing up for more classes. Her professor was impressed with her moxie and soon came to realize that Sue was more than a pretty face in his otherwise all-male classroom. As her aptitude for math became clear, he hired her to grade his graduate-student papers and perform statistics in research projects. When Sue confided how unhappy she was with her art classes and her inability, due to her grades, to transfer to UCLA to study architecture, he sympathized and encouraged her to consider math and engineering. But Sue was losing her appetite for school. After three years, she dropped out.

  Aerospace was booming in Southern California. What had begun in 1933 as 1,000 workers had exploded into a commercial enterprise of over 300,000 by 1943. By the end of World War II, American aircraft manufacture constituted the largest single industry in the world. Jobs were everywhere. Directionless, Sue applied to be a typist at Convair, an aeronautics company in Pomona, California. She had little enthusiasm for the work when she dropped off her application, but she hoped for a steady income.

  The next day, Sue returned to Convair, and the recruiter took her aside. The company needed computers and was willing to train their recruits. “Do you like numbers?” he asked.

  “I love numbers,” Sue replied brightly, silently adding to herself, “Much more than letters.”

  Sue was hired as a computer, a position she had never heard of. Each morning she signed in at the security gate and then punched in with her time card. She found herself spending her days with one other woman, surrounded by equations. They were given the raw data from the company’s rocket tests as well as the equations the engineers needed solved. From this the two computers would write out each step of the solution by hand. Sue would cram pages of large tablet notebooks with her calculations in blue ink. It was far more than simple arithmetic; it required all of Sue’s training in geometry and calculus.

  The lines of text and numbers formed an intricate pattern of commands. The computers plotted how each command would lead to the next, trying to keep the complicated system as simple as possible. To a casual observer it looked like a jumble of numbers and letters with no meaning at all. Yet there was an inherent elegance in the clean series of commands, each one building on the next, bringing the solution closer. A circle around a number brought the solution from one equation into the command line of the next. It took skill to keep the equations clean. A less skillful computer would clutter her notebook with unnecessary equations, oblivious to the beauty and utility of keeping the commands tidy. They were building something, and the architect in Sue loved the feeling of construction. She was completely engrossed in the work, never looking up at the clock.

  Although she couldn’t know it yet, Sue was programming. The lines of commands that she built were the forerunners of the first computer programs. They would one day easily translate into lines of code, and Sue would find herself putting the same craftsmanship into clean, streamlined programs built with a digital computer that she had into her work with paper and pencil.

  While she wrote equations in neat lines, her love life was frequently messy. There were simply too many boys to choose from. She met Pete Finley at a bridge club when they were students, he at the all-male Caltech and she at Scripps College. At first she didn’t think much of him. He was two years older and studying chemistry. He’d been very sick with valley fever the previous year—the fungal infection had invaded his body, causing him unbearable muscle and joint pain. The illness had made him serious and aloof. Sue at first dismissed him as an overly reserved man but slowly grew to love his thoughtful, softhearted personality. Yet when he asked her to marry him she shook her head; she figured there had to be someone even better out there.

  Unfortunately, Sue found the world of men outside college to be lacking. Although she was surrounded by men at Convair, among her colleagues there was nobody she wanted to go out with, much less marry. Two months after turning down Pete’s proposal, she met him at a friend’s wedding in Northern California. The months of bad dates cast him in a more flattering light. Suddenly, Sue realized she’d made a mistake. As they sat together talking, Sue blurted out, “OK, I’ll marry you.” Pete looked at her, surprised; he hadn’t repeated his proposal since she had first said no. When he looked in her eyes, he realized she was dead serious. They laughed together, and Pete took her hand, leading her to the dance floor. They were back together.

  They married on a sunny California day in 1957 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Arcadia. Sue told her mother after the wedding that she didn’t want kids right away. Nodding with a superior smile, Sue’s mother didn’t say a word. She wouldn’t put any pressure on her daughter yet, since she knew that the fierce independence of a twenty-year-old girl often softened with time into the desire for motherhood.

  In spite of her plans, as these things are wont to happen, Sue became pregnant soon after the wedding. Her mother hugged her and was so happy she cried. As Sue’s belly grew, her commute down the 10 Freeway from Pasadena to Convair seemed to balloon as well. The traffic was terrible. Sue hated sitting in her car on the backed-up freeway. She wanted a job closer to home, but she knew that, as a pregnant woman, she wouldn’t get hired. Realistically, she wouldn’t even be able to keep her current job once her employer found out she was going to have a baby. She knew what was expected of her, but she hated the idea of leaving the work she loved. Looking over the flyers at a bulletin board at Caltech, she came across a job posting for computers at JPL, just a short drive from campus. Wouldn’t that be convenient? Sue thought dreamily. I could do that job.

  But soon all thoughts of work were gone. As her due date neared and her pregnancy became obvious, she had to leave Convair. At home, she got the baby’s room ready and started picturing her life as a housewife and mother. The small kicks within, growing stronger each day, made her mindful of the future. She was getting excited. At night, Pete would marvel at her belly, wondering if they were going to have a boy or a girl
.

  A week before her due date, Sue started feeling contractions. It was finally time. She woke up Pete and called her mother to meet her at the hospital before they hurried into the car. Sue was whisked off into labor and delivery while Pete was confined to the waiting room with the other fathers, the sounds of women having babies emanating faintly through the open door.

  Labor was agonizing and stretched into a second day. The pain racked her body and sapped her strength. Finally the moment was at hand; the doctor encouraged her to push. After one last effort Sue’s child entered the world. “What is it? What is it?” she called out, eager to learn if she had a son or a daughter. “It’s a boy!” the doctor announced. Trembling from her exertions, Sue let the words sink in. She was the mother of a little boy. She was so happy. Yet the room was too quiet. There were no cries from the infant. Across the room Sue could see the bluish tone to his skin. As they wheeled the baby out of the room, the nurse told Sue something was wrong. “Your baby needs help. He’s not breathing,” she said hurriedly. “We’ll know more soon.”

  Sue and Pete named their little angel Stephen and hoped for the best. Heavy with postpartum hormones and easily alarmed, Sue could do nothing but wait and pray that her son would pull through.

  Two days later, when the doctor came in, she could tell from the look on his face that the news wasn’t good. “I’m sorry,” he began. “There was nothing we could do.” A guttural, savage cry escaped Sue before her body succumbed to heaving sobs. She clung to Pete before falling off the hospital bed onto the floor and dragging him down with her. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t hear the nurses rushing to her, helping to get her back into bed. She tore at her hair, mindless of the pain. Her mother and husband talked to her, but there was nothing anyone could say. She was overcome with guilt. She had said she didn’t want a family. Was this punishment for those thoughtless words? What she wouldn’t give to take them back.

  Before she left the hospital she held her tiny lifeless newborn in her arms. Stephen was swaddled in receiving blankets and looked impossibly small. Wake up, Sue shouted silently, wake up. She touched her fingers to the small heart-shaped face. The skin was still warm. His lips formed a perfect pink pout. Sue held her son for only a few minutes and then let him go. There would never be an explanation. Her baby boy was lost forever.

  Sue was drowning in her grief. At the grocery store she would look with bewilderment at the people surrounding her. It seemed incredible that in the midst of her crumbling existence, the world kept spinning and people went on with their daily lives. She stared at the women ahead of her in the checkout line, wondering how it was possible for them to have no inkling of her devastation.

  Although Sue wasn’t religious, she decided to go to church to have them say a blessing for her baby. While she didn’t believe that because he had died before he was baptized he was headed for an eternity in limbo, she thought a few kind words from a minister would help ease her own troubled mind. She stood at the door of the church nervously before pulling on the door handle. It didn’t budge; it was locked. As she turned away, she felt the stinging pain of loss and wondered if the torment within her would ever fade.

  Graduating from Notre Dame, Helen was anxious to leave Indiana and live with her brother, Edwin, in Pasadena, and to join her parents, who had also moved there. She got her first glimpse of the valley town in 1953. It seemed small, dusty, and crowded with palm trees. Despite these dreary first impressions, the town would become her home for the next sixty years.

  Helen had thought she’d find work decorating department-store windows, but the industry on the West Coast wasn’t what she expected. She found her job applications continually passed over, usually for someone who had a connection to the employer through a family member or a friend. Discouraged, Helen wasn’t sure what kind of work to do. She’d graduated from a top college with excellent grades, but no one wanted to hire her. As her feelings of self-worth plummeted, her dependence on her family intensified.

  Edwin had moved to Pasadena to work as a structural engineer at JPL. One evening, he came home enthused about a job he had seen posted. It was for a computer. He knew immediately it would be perfect for his sister, the math genius. Helen was enthusiastic too. Perhaps all those classes she took in college wouldn’t be for naught. Her nerves and excitement mounting, she tried to shake off feelings of inadequacy. She worried over her qualifications and even her accent, hoping she’d be good enough for the job. She once thought mathematics was an impractical whimsy and could scarcely believe that it was now a viable career option.

  PART II

  1950s

  Barbara Lewis (later Paulson)

  Janez Lawson

  Helen Yee Chow (later Ling)

  Susan Finley

  CHAPTER 3

  Rockets Rising

  It had taken Barbara Lewis years to get to this point. She lovingly touched the stark white paint on the giant missile before adding her loopy signature on the blank canvas of its skin. It was April 1955, and a small crowd had gathered, saying their good-byes to the thirty-nine-foot-tall structure that had dominated their lives for the past ten years. Dismembered and loaded onto a convoy of trucks, it was headed for its ultimate test, the White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico, just sixty miles north of the border with Mexico. As they bid the missile farewell, the group at JPL thought their struggles with the troublesome rocket were finally over. They were wrong.

  The Corporal missile containing Barbara and her colleagues’ signatures, 1955 (Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  It all started in the late 1940s with a program called the Corporal: a guided-missile system unlike anything JPL had attempted. The army wanted a new weapon, a long-range jet-propelled missile that could carry a thousand-pound warhead for a hundred miles at a speed capable of eluding an enemy fighter aircraft. It was Barbara’s first project at JPL and seemed headed for quick success. Their early prototype had flown forty miles into the atmosphere in October 1945 at White Sands. The rocket just touched the edges of space—the highest a rocket had ever flown—before crashing back down to Earth. That model was known as the WAC Corporal, WAC standing for “Without Altitude Control,” since it had no guidance system, and also for “Women’s Army Corps,” since it was smaller than other missiles given military-sounding names. The group referred to it as the little sister. It was a stepping-stone before they tackled the larger, more technologically advanced Corporal, designed to stand nearly twice as tall.

  Frank Malina (middle) weighing the WAC Corporal at White Sands in 1945 (Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  Translating the little sister’s success into a missile capable of carrying a warhead was not as simple as they had hoped. JPL was still assessing the use of liquid fuel in rockets. Liquid propellants held the promise of packing the maximum possible heat into the smallest number of molecules. They could ignite quickly and burn rapidly. Yet the same capabilities that indicated such promise also made these propellants inherently dangerous, as those who had been at JPL for some time were only too aware.

  Tests of the liquid propellants had been explosive. Only a few years before Barbara started, the group at JPL had set the hillside behind the test pits on fire, incinerating not just the dry brush but also much of their equipment. The problem lay in an unexplained phenomenon. The liquid propellants had the habit of making the engines throb. The pulsing would start slowly and then build, until the motor couldn’t take any more and exploded into bits. To make matters worse, the throbbing was sporadic, making the explosions unpredictable.

  Barbara knew little about the danger. With her plump cheeks and soft skin, she looked even younger than her nineteen years. Underneath her schoolgirl façade was a woman determined to fit into the rocket culture of JPL. It wasn’t easy; she found the shock of explosions caused by experimental mixtures of liquid hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen jolting. The people were loud too; the boisterous conversations around the lab were both exciting and a little overwhelming. Mostly,
though, it was the warning sound of the old Ford truck horn that still made her jump.

  But each boom represented new data for Barbara. She calculated the thrust produced by a mixture of aniline and red fuming nitric acid, a violent mixture that caused a red glare to blaze out of the rocket’s engine. From the tedium of their daily work, Barbara and the other computers were unknowingly computing something earth-shattering; the same qualities they were helping refine in the liquid propellant would one day put the first humans on the moon. They were helping to develop a hypergolic propellant, a combination of fuel and oxidant that would ignite on contact. Separately, the components were stable, but once mixed in the rocket combustion chamber they would catch fire. Two decades later, hypergolic propellant would fill the tanks of the Project Apollo launch vehicles.

  Barbara used her calculations of the test data to determine how missiles would fly. It took an entire day to calculate a single trajectory. When she was done, her notebook held a prized piece of work: her hand-drawn picture of the path the Corporal would take as it flew through the air. Barbara’s notebooks, and those of the other computers, would be covered with trajectories as they sought out the ideal mix of engineering components on the missile.

  In 1948, at the same time as they were working on the Corporal, they were also modifying its little sister, the WAC Corporal. Barbara found the calculations for the little sister especially intriguing since they were now launching it as a two-stage rocket. The slim American rocket would sit atop the Nazi V-2, a ballistic missile best known for bringing Paris and London to their knees. When the war ended, the enemy rocket, as well as the Nazi scientists who developed it, had been captured and brought to the States. Its potential was chilling: it could target a city from two hundred miles away. The idea of combining the power of the V-2 with the high-flying WAC Corporal was ingenious. The engineers dreamed that by uniting the two they could burst through into outer space. The V-2 would pack a powerful punch and then detach, firing the WAC Corporal as the V-2 fell back to Earth. The WAC Corporal could then fly higher than ever before. The engineers at JPL called this combination the Bumper WAC.