Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  Barbara had never experienced the kind of romance Harry offered. He picked her up for their dates and whisked her away to candlelit dinners in swanky restaurants all over Los Angeles. Harry worked in insurance and had a knack for striking up a conversation. He talked with the same zeal Barbara did, and they found dinner naturally leading to dancing and then to long conversations late at night as they held hands, savoring the last moments of their date.

  One Saturday evening he picked Barbara up early to go dancing, remarking how pretty she looked. She wore a dress Harry loved; it was black knit with a large white collar and clung to the curves of her body. They set off, driving on the Arroyo Seco Parkway through the stark brown hills of Pasadena. As they crested a rise in the San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles was spread out before them, the late-afternoon sun bouncing off houses and buildings. The city looked small nestled between the mountains and the ocean. “Where are we going so early?” Barbara asked. “You’ll find out” was Harry’s reply, a sly smile on his face.

  Harry was feeling an intense need to embrace life. He’d just finished a round of tests with his doctor and been declared healthy. Only a few months earlier he’d had a scare when his doctors had mentioned the possibility that he had cancer. Not only was the disease frightening, but in the 1950s, such a diagnosis carried the sting of shame, since some believed that sufferers were paying for their sins, that cancer was the consequence of an unclean life. When Harry learned that he wasn’t sick after all, he wanted to celebrate. It was Barbara he turned to.

  When they pulled into the Hollywood-Lockheed air terminal in Burbank, Barbara was shocked. Harry delighted in seeing her eyes pop as she begged him to tell her where they were going. He shook his head and laughed as Barbara squeezed his arm. “No time to explain,” he said. “We have a plane to catch.” They flew to San Diego and then caught a cab to the famous Hotel Del Coronado. “It’s just like I told you,” Harry said teasingly. “I’m taking you to a dance. We’ll fly back home tonight.”

  Barbara was breathless at the sight of the imposing white hotel sitting at the ocean’s edge. American flags beat against the breeze from atop red-tiled turrets. It was a hotel where celebrities such as Joan Crawford and Donna Reed could be found relaxing on the weekends. On some evenings, a yet-undiscovered Liberace played piano while Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz practiced their comedy act. Just walking in the doors rendered Barbara starstruck.

  She and Harry stood on the deck, her arm in the crook of his, her head on his shoulder as the sun set over the ocean. This is what it’s like to be in love, she thought. But she wasn’t ready to tell him. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be in love and get married. The idea of pledging herself to another was terrifying. It was enough for her to savor these moments, to be loved this intensely, even if it proved fleeting. She watched the gold disk of the sun drop languidly into the ocean and turned to dance with Harry in the gleaming ballroom.

  Barbara’s future was muddled. Just as she wasn’t sure where she was headed in her relationship with Harry, she wasn’t sure where her work at JPL was going. When the team had been working on Project Orbiter the goal was evident: developing the first satellite. Now, with the project rejected, their objective was no longer clear. They were still going to strap the Baby Sergeants onto von Braun’s Redstone rocket, but it was now called the Jupiter rocket and funded as a ballistic-missile program.

  Barbara might have been glad to know that, with the parts sitting on the shelf and the design in front of them, JPL wasn’t planning to stop building a satellite. They were going to ignore the chain of command and go ahead with their plans. With their collaborators, von Braun and the Redstone team, they began testing nose cones. They cleverly stated that their goal was to find a nose cone that could survive the destructive effects of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The problem was that when the surface of the nose cone falls through the flammable gases of the atmosphere during reentry, the friction between them causes heat, igniting the gases and engulfing the nose cone in flames. But to test the nose cone, they would have to build the whole rocket and send it out of the atmosphere. This was the real point. Under the guise of the Jupiter ballistic-missile project, they strapped the Baby Sergeants onto the Redstone rocket, exactly as they had planned to do in Project Orbiter.

  The new design was known as Jupiter-C, and the computers soon began to calculate how best to structure it. The rocket would be divided into four stages. The first would be the Redstone rocket, sitting at the base. The next stage would be a spinning tub of eleven Baby Sergeants, followed by a second tub of three Baby Sergeants. Finally, the fourth stage would contain the payload, the forbidden satellite itself, strapped onto the top of the nose cone while a lone Baby Sergeant gave it a final nudge into space. The unauthorized fourth stage would be restricted to designs on paper; they wouldn’t be allowed to actually load the satellite onto the rocket.

  Small electric motors rotated the tubs and started them spinning even before takeoff. The spinning tubs gave the rockets stability and ensured that small differences in thrust between the individual Baby Sergeants would not cause problems. As the rocket launched, the spinning increased slowly to stabilize the rocket, which was otherwise prone to bending from the uneven thrust of the Baby Sergeants. Helen Chow knew this calculation had to be precise; if the spinning didn’t perfectly match the Redstone’s movement through space, the entire system would vibrate and fly apart, leaving only pieces. To prevent this she had the tubs spinning at 550 rpm before the launch and then, 70 seconds after liftoff, gradually increasing to 650 rpm. Finally, after 155 seconds, she calculated the speed could slowly increase again to 750 rpm, where it would remain until the missile reached the peak of its trajectory. She rechecked her math repeatedly until she felt sure the design was correct. With the numbers coming back from their ground tests, she was growing confident in the unusual scheme.

  The engineers marveled at Helen’s ability. She worked quickly and accurately. Her knowledge of mathematics was exceptional, and if she had been a man applying for the job, she would likely have been hired as an engineer. This was true for many of the computers, whose education, frequently consisting of a bachelor of science degree, was identical to that of the young men being hired in engineering. Helen quickly became a favorite with the engineers, a go-to girl for problems that seemed impossible.

  Meanwhile, Marie and the engineers at JPL were plotting a new tracking system, called Microlock, built on research from the early guidance systems of the Corporal. Scribbling away in her notebook, Marie was calculating how a phase-locked loop, where the output signal is in step with the incoming signal, might work. Similar to the principle of how a kitchen wall clock slowly loses time and needs to be adjusted every once in a while using a more accurate clock, Marie and the engineers estimated that by adjusting the equipment, housed in a twenty-five-foot-long trailer, they could detect very tiny signals as small as a milliwatt from three thousand miles away. This was critical, since the signal from the satellite would be sent using a radio frequency, the low power of which made it little more than a will-o’-the-wisp floating through the cosmos. The phase-locked loop took the signal from the satellite and the surrounding noise (the kitchen clock in the analogy above) and compared its frequency to an artificial reference without noise (the more accurate clock). The filtered signal would now be sensitive enough to detect the satellite moving even a few centimeters through the sky. Microlock was developing into the ideal way to keep track of the satellite, if they ever got a chance to launch one.

  “Well, we might not know where Jupiter-C is heading, but I know where Margie is going tonight,” Barbara teased mercilessly at the commissary one afternoon. Margie blushed and tried to deny her Friday-night plans, but the women wouldn’t let up. “That’s every weekend this month now,” Ginny said, laughing at Margie’s pink cheeks. The computers poked fun at Margie regularly about her budding romance with one of the engineers. They watched as the pair made awkward conversation around the lab
, studiously avoiding eye contact. Everyone in the lab could see how serious they were getting. Margie was the youngest of their group, inexperienced in the ways of dating. Her youth and beauty meant that she was constantly underestimated. She was one of the brightest girls in the group and had seemingly limitless potential.

  They all wanted her to go to college, and course catalogs found their way onto her desk frequently. While the computers liked to tease her, they watched with real concern as her relationship with the engineer developed. “She’s too smart for him,” Barbara said. “It’ll be a mistake if she marries him. They simply won’t last.”

  While the group fretted over Margie, Helen was surprised to find an old acquaintance had tracked her down, all the way from China. The last time she had seen Arthur Ling, he had been a carefree young man who flitted from major to major at Canton College until finally settling on a degree in history. Delayed by World War II, he took twice as long as Helen to graduate from college. Arthur was at a party after having finished school when he started up a conversation with a friend who worked in immigration. “Would you like to go to America?” he asked unexpectedly. Arthur thought his friend was joking and was surprised when he turned up with the visa paperwork the next day. Before he knew it, he was on his way to Los Angeles. He soon got in touch with Helen, but when they met again, their roles were reversed. He was no longer the big man on campus. He had slipped into obscurity while Helen’s star shone brighter than ever. He was transfixed by her energy and smarts, and they started dating.

  At JPL, Helen had little time to reflect on her new love interest. She was busy working on Jupiter-C. With the Microlock system equipped and the stages of the rocket design set, they were ready for their first test. The computers worked late the evening of September 19, 1956. The first launch of Jupiter-C would take place at 10:45 that night. Helen was uneasy. She couldn’t eat a bite of food, and the coffee she’d had a few hours earlier was churning away in her stomach. But her mind was three thousand miles away on Launchpad 5 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

  The launch was secret, known only to the U.S. government. At the Pentagon, officials wrung their hands with worry. They weren’t fooled by JPL’s subversive attempts to mask Jupiter-C as a simple nose-cone experiment. It seemed the launch might be a ruse, that instead of watching a rocket fly and evaluating a nose cone, they might actually be witnessing the world’s first satellite launch. With Cold War tensions swelling, Eisenhower feared political fallout if the U.S. Army launched the first satellite. Along with this concern was the need to keep the missiles the army was developing covert. It wouldn’t do to have the top-secret rockets front and center at a launch.

  The Pentagon needn’t have worried. In fact, to prevent Jupiter-C from launching the world’s first satellite, steps had been taken. The fourth and final stage of the rocket contained no fuel. The Baby Sergeant sat empty at its peak. Most important, there was no satellite strapped into the nose cone atop the launch vehicle. Instead, there were heavy sandbags inside.

  On schedule, Jupiter-C Missile RS-27 was fired at 1:45 a.m. Eastern time on September 20. The rocket lifted off slowly, the support arm falling back while white smoke began to spread across the launchpad. The tubs of Sergeant missiles spun at the top of the rocket, creating a flash of black and white as they gained speed. A fiery blaze came straight down from the nozzle of the rocket as it lifted off. It was soon out of sight, but back in the control room in Pasadena, Helen was watching the numbers. They never got to see the launch itself, despite their desire to watch the rockets they helped build leave Earth in all their glory. Thanks to the Microlock system, no image was necessary—they could track the rocket’s path through space by numbers alone.

  Her fingers flying across her notebook, Helen noted when the first-stage Redstone fell off and the second stage of eleven Baby Sergeants fired for six seconds before falling back to Earth. Then the third stage of three Baby Sergeants fired, sending the delicate instruments even farther up through the atmosphere. The third stage fell away, and the final stage, despite being filled with sand instead of a satellite, was speeding farther than any man-made object had ever gone. Helen’s eyes popped when she calculated that it had achieved a Mach 18 velocity and climbed 3,335 miles into the air, setting a new record for altitude. With the numbers confirmed, JPL erupted in excitement, while in Alabama von Braun literally danced with joy. The launch was more successful than they had dreamed possible. Helen gleefully slipped into Chinese exclamations as both elation and weariness washed over her. They had done it, even though there was no satellite.

  As the celebration died down, Helen sank into a chair. She was awash with feelings, happy at their success but frustrated with thoughts of what might have been. If only there had been a satellite in the fourth stage instead of sandbags, she thought, we’d be celebrating the first man-made object in orbit. There was no doubt in her mind, or anyone else’s, that if they had gone ahead with their design and put a satellite at the helm and fuel in that final rocket, their creation would be circling the globe at this very moment. The sense of loss hit Helen hard while the lack of food and sleep preyed on her emotions. Her eyes filled with tears. She felt cheated. She took it personally. But there was still hope. Now they’ll have to give us a chance, she thought.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ninety Days and Ninety Minutes

  It was a cool, clear night in Washington, D.C., on October 4, 1957. Bill Pickering, JPL’s director, was in town for a weeklong meeting of the International Geophysical Year participants. On Monday the Soviet delegate, Anatoly Blagonravov, had made a progress report. After he spoke, his English translator interpreted, “We’re pretty close to launching a satellite.” The man next to Pickering leaned over and whispered in his ear, “He didn’t say that. In Russian, he said the launching was imminent.” Pickering nodded, unconcerned. Only a few months earlier, in June, President Eisenhower had made a similar statement when speaking of the American contribution to the IGY. Satellites were coming, but there was no telling when.

  Now it was Friday night, and Pickering stepped into the eye-popping, gold-lined grand hall of the Soviet embassy. Gold veneer lined the railings of the winding staircase in wide strips, making the light bounce over the marble columns and crystal chandeliers. The cocktail party was packed with scientists, politicians, and journalists celebrating the end of the proceedings. Despite the warning he’d had on Monday, Pickering wasn’t prepared for where the evening would take him.

  It had been a challenging year at JPL. After the record-shattering test of Jupiter-C in September, they watched it stumble in May due to a guidance malfunction. The rocket flew an erratic arc before plunging into the ocean. When they recovered the payload, they found it ripped apart by sharks.

  The third launch, on August 8, was flawless. Each stage uncoupled from the next with ease, sending the Jupiter-C higher. The rocket included fuel in the fourth stage, but at its helm was no satellite, only a sandbag. The supposed goal of the project, testing nose cones, was a success. The nose cone recovered after the launch was intact despite the extreme conditions of reentering the atmosphere. In calculating the effects of reentry, the computers had found their experience working on the Corporal project useful. Extreme heat and friction are capable of completely disintegrating objects entering our atmosphere. Even large rocks, such as meteors, turn a glowing red when they encounter the flammable gases that make all life on Earth possible. They become as hot as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit before being burnt to a crisp. Roughly a hundred tons of meteor dust rain down on our planet’s surface daily. Thanks to the atmosphere, it is just dust, not massive rocks.

  To survive reentry, a new generation of nose cones had been designed. Instead of the sleek needles that reduced drag and helped ease rockets through the air after takeoff, these nose cones bulged obtrusively. Engineers across the country were finding that the thin models provided little protection from the extreme conditions while blunt shapes cushioned the nose cone in a thick shock wave of gas, sp
aring it from the atmosphere. First described in theory by H. Julian Allen at the Ames Research Center, in California, the successful nose cones might look clunky but were a key piece of technology in the ongoing space race.

  Armed with a nose cone able to withstand the assaults of the atmosphere, the new rocket was rechristened Juno. JPL hoped that the new name, unencumbered by military association, would convince Washington of its potential in peaceful endeavors. They had clearly shown they had the capabilities to launch a satellite, so how could the brass say no?

  Meanwhile, the navy’s Project Vanguard was limping along. Because the design depended on rockets that weren’t fully developed, each rocket of the multistage project was being launched separately. The first stage took off on a rainy night in December 1956. It was a success but paled in comparison to Juno, reaching only a third of its height. While Juno had three launches under its belt and an operational four-stage rocket, Vanguard had yet to test its second stage.

  So it was a surprise to the computers when they learned Juno was being shut down. Helen Chow sighed as she got the notebooks ready for storage. Everything they needed to launch a satellite was written down on pages destined for a dark closet. It was heartbreaking to have their work boxed up when they had been so close. In response, the lab turned melancholy. Even the lunch table, usually a place of merriment, descended into crabby conversation.

  Marie Crowley felt the change keenly. She’d left the computer lab the year before to join the chemistry department. Chemistry had always been where she wanted to be. Of the thirty-five people in the department, she was one of only three women. She enjoyed moving around the lab instead of sitting at a desk all day. She was comfortable among the chemicals and graduated cylinders, carefully setting up her experiments. One of her favorite parts was blowing glass. While laboratories bought some pieces of standard glassware, they needed to be able to make custom-designed pieces as well as repair the equipment they had. Every chemistry student learned the delicate art of bending and blowing glass. Marie held the glass over the Bunsen burner and watched the orange flames lap over the sides. Slowly, the solid glass turned loose while she spun it rapidly to form a cylinder before putting her lips up to the tube and blowing. In her hands the glass ballooned outward, forming a flask. There was beauty in watching the glass melt; it looked like water flowing in midair.