Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  Von Braun’s fame, in a field where Barbara was just beginning her career, demanded admiration; however, seeing him in person made her uneasy. His unlined face brought her back to a moment in her adolescence when a voice on the radio had described London as a collapsed heap of wood, brick, and cement, brought to its knees by the world’s first ballistic missile. While thousands of Londoners suffered shock, von Braun had sipped champagne. Yet a decade had changed so many things. The Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (“Vengeance Weapon Two”) rocket, better known as the V-2, was now a mere plaything at JPL. The man behind that weapon was now casually eating lunch across from her.

  Macie shuddered to remember the early whispers about von Braun. “He’s bloodthirsty and arrogant,” engineers told her when he was first captured and brought to the United States. “He’s nothing but a murderer.” But the whispers wouldn’t last long. The former SS officer, with his affable, easy manner, was quick to make friends. He had a knack for discussing rocketry in all its complexity with the engineers in the offices after horsing around with the mechanics in the pits. He could explain the science so neatly that even a layperson could understand the basics. Despite his terrible past, he was becoming an integral part of America’s future in space. Strikingly, the first U.S. Army collaboration culminating in a project not involving weaponry would rely heavily on Wernher von Braun.

  Just as Macie knew his past, so she knew why he was at JPL: Project Orbiter. Ever since Macie had started at the lab, in 1949, plans for the first satellite had been in the works. They had long dreamed of shooting a spacecraft so high that it would reach a perfect balance between the tug of Earth’s gravitational pull and its own inertia. With the forces equalized, the satellite could orbit Earth. Just as the moon carves a gravitational path around our planet, their satellite would need no external power to encircle the globe. The idea of a satellite ceaselessly orbiting Earth had been around since Isaac Newton’s time. The power to achieve it, however, was new.

  In 1947 William Pickering shared this idea in a paper in which he recommended that “extensive cosmic ray studies be deferred until a satellite rocket can be produced.” Even then he had the project, both its scope and its ultimate scientific goal, clear in his mind. The U.S. government, however, wasn’t interested in funding projects without a clear military purpose. The proposal languished until a symposium in 1954 at which Pickering, now JPL’s director, strongly advocated for an earth satellite as the U.S. contribution to the International Geophysical Year.

  Conceived of four years earlier at the suggestion of physicist Lloyd Berkner, the IGY would be a worldwide science project, the largest cooperative study of Earth ever conducted. Held from July 1957 through December 1958, the year would take advantage of the extraordinary solar activity predicted for that time period. Countries from around the globe would devise new ways to study Earth, including the use of cosmic rays, gravity, ionosphere physics, oceanography, and meteorology. JPL was abuzz with talk of the IGY. In the computer room they wondered excitedly what experiments were afoot.

  “The International Geophysical Year is special because of solar cycle nineteen,” an engineer explained to Barbara. “The sun will be intensely active. We’ll see the greatest number of sunspots in recorded history.”

  As Barbara spread the news to the women, she saw that one of the new hires was staring at her blankly. She knew that one wouldn’t last long. The problem was becoming common. As the need for more computers grew, they took more chances, hiring girls with limited experience in the hope that Macie’s team could train them to become proficient in math and science. It didn’t always pan out. Being a computer wasn’t a job just anyone could do. Barbara and Macie found themselves lamenting when their applicants lacked competence in math or science.

  When Macie first read Helen Chow’s application, she was encouraged to see she had graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a minor in mathematics. This was exactly the kind of girl she wanted to hire. Meanwhile, Helen fretted that her degree wouldn’t be enough to get her a spot at JPL. She was desperate for the job and hoped Macie would give her a chance. Even if math hadn’t been her major, it was the subject she had always been best at.

  Edwin dropped her off at the personnel department one morning before going on through the gates to his office. “Good luck,” he called back over his shoulder. He wasn’t worried. He knew his baby sister was smart and would almost certainly be hired. Helen didn’t share his confidence. She had received many rejections, for jobs far simpler than this one. She filled out her application and then took a seat in the small waiting room, where she nervously tapped her fingers on her knees.

  It was a long wait. By the time she was called into the interview room, she had worked herself into a froth of nervousness and could barely speak. Helen’s first impression of Macie was of a strict old lady. Despite her cumbersome accent, Helen answered Macie’s questions about her education and experience with math. She tried to remain calm as Macie inquired about her background and education. Recovering from her fit of anxiety, Helen explained that she had chosen art as her major, hoping it would lead to a career. She spoke of her math classes, on the other hand, the way some girls described going to the movies. They were pure entertainment for her; she never dreamed she would be able to get a job using those skills. It was exactly what Macie wanted to hear.

  Helen next interviewed with Barbara. In some ways Barbara was the opposite of her supervisor. She was young, very friendly, and eager to welcome new women to the group. Although she wasn’t officially the supervisor, Barbara trained the new girls and oversaw their progress. Her engaging personality won Helen over immediately. It felt as though they were destined to become fast friends.

  Before Helen left the lab, Macie offered her the job, something she rarely did on the spot. She was so confident in Helen’s skills that she wanted to get her started right away. Helen was stunned; she couldn’t believe someone had finally taken a chance and hired her.

  Barbara was somewhat fatigued with the new hires. They were bringing on an average of two women a month. Each new girl took an extraordinary effort to train, and the brunt of this work automatically fell on her. Still, she believed Helen would last instead of fizzling out on the job as so many had before her. JPL was in the middle of a race, and they needed as many competent computers as possible.

  The IGY was a time to begin anew the scientific exchange between east and west, so long interrupted by war. With the death of Stalin, in 1953, the opportunity for worldwide cooperation was open. Yet the race to develop the first satellite brought intense competition instead of collaboration. America wanted to beat the Soviets badly. A secret race was also unfolding within America’s borders. The army, navy, and air force were each preparing competing designs for satellites, and none of them knew what their rivals were proposing. A special government committee appointed by the Department of Defense would decide the winner.

  The competition made everyone at JPL tense. To distract Barbara from the strain of her job, Harry took her on a date to the Hollywood Palladium, on Sunset Boulevard. Harry and Barbara joined the crowd on the enormous ten-thousand-square-foot dance floor. Despite the venue’s size, the big band with its horns and drums had no trouble filling it with music. The floor was packed with couples, and there was barely room to dance, much less breathe.

  Barbara felt overwhelmed. Her mother had just died of a heart attack, the same ailment that had taken her father’s life, leaving her and her siblings without parents. It was hard for Barbara to accept that her mother, who had always been so strong, was gone. She was only fifty-seven years old. The anonymity of the ballroom was comforting, and Barbara lost herself in the music. Harry held her close as the band started up her favorite song, “It Had to Be You.” She looked up. The twinkling bulbs on the ceiling looked like the stars. Her mind wandered back to space.

  No rocket in existence packed enough punch to deliver a satellite into space. Project Orbiter was intent on changing this, and JPL engi
neers began to design the spacecraft they hoped to boost into the beyond. The computers and engineers worked together to develop the satellite’s shell and antenna. It had to be sprightly enough to careen into space but also strong enough to protect the delicate scientific equipment from the effects of the atmosphere and beyond.

  Although the vacuum of space has no temperature, objects flying through it do. The range of these temperatures is formidable: over 120 degrees Celsius in the sun, and in the shade lower than minus 100 degrees Celsius. The challenge facing JPL was like that of designing a ship that could sail in both the freezing seas of Antarctica and boiling water. The engineers chose fiberglass for the shell and antennas and then played with the design as they attempted to find the perfect balance between strength and speed. The final satellite, the computers estimated, would weigh in at around five pounds.

  As light as the satellite was, they needed enough thrust to fight the massive pull of Earth’s gravity and then move through the atmosphere and into orbit. The gas molecules of the atmosphere collide with the skin of the rocket, slowing it down. A smooth, waxy skin on the rocket lessens this friction, just as it’s easier to skate on smooth ice than bumpy. This atmospheric resistance requires a massive amount of energy to overcome. In fact, the energy cost to get from Earth to the moon is nothing compared with the cost of simply escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Because of gravity and atmospheric drag, if you don’t give a rocket enough thrust, it will simply be hurled back to the ground. From this perspective, the giant leap for mankind was in leaving Earth’s atmosphere, not in a single step on the moon. There was only one way to accomplish this: multiple rockets set to fire in stages.

  “Why do we need so many rockets?” Marie asked Barbara. “Why can’t we just use one big rocket?” Listening to the conversation was Margaret Behrens, affectionately known as Margie. Margie was eighteen and had been at JPL only a month. A pretty girl with soft blond hair and shrewd eyes, she had been hired straight out of high school and was remarkably bright. Yet behind her sweet manner was a personality formed by growing up in her father’s house. She bristled against authority, a consequence of struggling against his strictness. Macie, with her kind, motherly demeanor, acted as an antidote. Her fellow computers soothed Margie’s insecurities and incited her curiosity. She didn’t want to just crunch numbers; she wanted to understand what her calculations meant. In this case, they were solving the riddle of multistage rocketry.

  “To get into orbit we have to launch a satellite at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour,” explained Barbara. “That’s five times as fast as the V-2. There’s no rocket in existence that can go that fast. And even if we could build a rocket capable of going that fast, it would shake all the instruments until they were jelly.” Marie laughed and nodded as Barbara continued. “So we make our rockets ride piggyback on each other. By doing a staged system we drop off the fuel tanks as we go. Once those fuel tanks run out of fuel they’re nothing but dead weight, and if we get rid of them, that’s less work for the upper-stage rockets to lift, so the satellite can fly higher.” Marie and Margie nodded together, picturing the rockets giving each other a push. Instead of using one forceful rocket moving so fast that it would shake their instrumentation to its doom, they would employ a series of rockets capable of maintaining speed. The sequence of rockets was similar to the way the women at JPL helped each other out, the group steadily building momentum.

  As part of the rocket sequence, the computers were working with small rockets known around the lab as Baby Sergeants. A scaled-down version of the larger Sergeant missile, they were only 4 feet long rather than 34 feet, and so slender that their diameter was a mere six inches. The small missile was like a toy to the women; it packed no military might. On its own it could do little but inform their calculations for bigger missiles, but the engineers and computers determined that if the Baby Sergeants were clustered together, they could pack a wallop. By lacing together fifteen Baby Sergeants, the computers calculated they could potentially produce 1,600 pounds of thrust for five seconds. This amount of power was perfect for the upper stages. But the sleek power of the Baby Sergeant, made at JPL, would also have to be combined with the massive strength of the Redstone rocket, made by von Braun’s team at the Redstone Arsenal.

  Originally a chemical weapons–manufacturing facility, producing such toxic products as mustard gas, the Redstone army post in Huntsville, Alabama, became home to von Braun and 126 other German scientists in 1950. They were sent there from Fort Bliss, Texas, the former base of operations for Operation Paperclip, the program that brought Nazi scientists to the United States after the war. Nestled in the Tennessee Valley, the lab was fertile soil for rocket research. By 1956, von Braun’s contributions were appreciated, and he was made director of the development operations program at the new Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone. With his new position he was ready for collaboration with JPL.

  The Redstone rocket was the spitting image of von Braun’s V-2 missile. It was massive—an impressive 70 feet high and 6 feet wide—and could produce 75,000 pounds of thrust. The computers and engineers called it the workhorse. It was just the rocket needed to give their satellite its first push into space.

  The team readied its proposal for Project Orbiter as the excitement grew at JPL. The computers and engineers strolled around the lab with wide smiles on their faces. Barbara could feel them leaving the shackles of making war machines behind. JPL, although a military institute, had been built on dreams of space exploration. Now it was really happening. For von Braun too, the project represented freedom. For the first time, he was working for the greater scientific good. Together with his team in Alabama, JPL planned to launch four scientific satellites, the first one going up as early as September 1956.

  But on August 9, 1955, their confidence was shattered. The U.S. Department of Defense Committee on Special Capabilities, making the decision in preparation for the IGY, had chosen the navy’s satellite, Project Vanguard, over theirs. Project Vanguard had a few advantages over Orbiter. Orbiter was designed to do the scientific minimum powered by a dependable and tested rocket system. Vanguard, on the other hand, was more scientifically ambitious but was powered by the Viking rocket, still in development. Vanguard’s proposal included a glittery bevy of scientific studies to be done from space once the satellite was up, including investigating ultraviolet light emitted in the vastness of space (such as that from young, hot stars); measuring the intensity of Earth’s gravitational force; and studying cosmic rays, the highly charged particles from outer space that surround our planet. In response, JPL promised to match Vanguard’s scientific prowess, but it was too late. Vanguard was the winner. Only their design would be funded, and the other projects would be scrapped.

  There were bitter protests from JPL. In addition to the design differences, the computers knew that one of the reasons Orbiter hadn’t been chosen was that the government wanted to preserve the focus of the army—whose ranks JPL belonged to—on missiles. With pressures from the Soviets mounting, there was strong feeling that the army should perfect nuclear warhead missiles before heading into satellite research. Moreover, rumors swirled that von Braun’s involvement had hindered the proposal. Although he was a central figure in U.S. rocket research, his Nazi past still incited resentment in Eisenhower’s administration. It was a blow. Around the lunch table, the computers and engineers lamented what fools the government bureaucrats were, yet there wasn’t anything anyone could do. Project Orbiter was dead.

  While everyone gloomily shuffled around the lab, Barbara was practically skipping. “How can you be happy at a time like this?” one of the computers asked her. “It’s Harry,” Barbara replied, smiling shyly.

  Barbara’s co-workers thought she was a lost cause when it came to relationships. She’d worked for JPL for almost a decade without any serious romantic involvement. She wouldn’t date anyone at the lab, despite having been asked out numerous times. Because she spent all her time at work, she had littl
e opportunity to meet anyone anywhere else, and any man she did date she scrutinized and found wanting. At twenty-seven, she was seen as an old maid by the younger computers. Now as she sat at her desk, on a day when she should be reeling from the Project Orbiter news, she felt nothing but the thrill of being in love.

  When she first met Harry, Barbara was pessimistic. She had been unimpressed by the men she’d dated from church up until then. Her active mind made it unbearable for her to spend time with someone without her intelligence and passion. And Harry hardly seemed like the man she had been waiting for. He was nine years older, as evidenced by the silver dusting the edges of his chestnut-brown hair. True to her nature, she wasn’t thinking of romance when he came up to her and introduced himself. Yet the longer they talked, the more she was intrigued. Like her, he didn’t act self-conscious or timid. He talked with a natural ease, like a man who was well liked and comfortable with himself. He was funny, and she found herself laughing.

  “How do you keep yourself busy?” he asked good-naturedly. He was expecting to hear her say she worked as a typist or a teacher and so couldn’t help raising his eyebrows when she said, “I’m a computer at JPL.” This was always a delicate point in her conversations with men. One of her past dates, a physician who liked to boast, couldn’t understand her lack of ego when he learned what her job entailed. She described the work modestly, but her enthusiasm shone through. Much to her surprise, Harry seemed to find her work as fascinating as she did. He could see her eyes sparkling with excitement as she described her days spent hunched over a notebook, calculating the capabilities of rocket engines. The look in her eyes was a challenge to him. He wanted to make her eyes twinkle like that.