It was 6 a.m. by the time Sue left the lab. She was dead on her feet, exhausted from the night’s work and its devastating finale. When she got home, Pete was watching the morning news as they began reporting on the failed launch. She suddenly jumped up, hardly believing her eyes. “Those are my numbers!” she cried, pointing to the calculations she had done just the night before, now written in chalk on a blackboard. She couldn’t believe it; her work had made the news.
After the failed launch, however, there was a salve for the wounded feelings at the lab: JPL had officially been made part of NASA. Although JPL’s success with Explorer in January would have seemed to make the transfer inevitable, in fact a delicate negotiation had taken place among the new space administration, the army, and Caltech. With these talks still in the works, NASA opened its doors in October without a scientist in its ranks. Pickering was holding out for Congress to designate JPL the “nation’s space laboratory.” But while the legislature wouldn’t give them the high-status label Pickering sought, Abe Silverstein, the new head of NASA’s Office of Space Flight Programs, made up for it by handing the lab a juicy new assignment. Under the NASA umbrella, JPL would be responsible for planning and executing crewless lunar and planetary missions in addition to developing the rockets needed to get there.
In December, Eisenhower signed an executive order putting JPL under the direction of NASA. Thankfully they would continue to be managed by Caltech, which gave them the same freedom and independence they had enjoyed when they were part of the army. The computers were joyous about the change. They loved the idea that they would no longer be called on to make weapons and delighted that they would be taking part in further scientific exploration.
It was Christmas 1958, and Harry surprised Barbara with a tree strung with lights and covered in decorations for her apartment in South Pasadena. She was thrilled with it; Harry was so romantic and spontaneous. After she got her coat on, they headed off to the lab’s Christmas party.
It seemed to be NASA-themed that year. JPL celebrated their new affiliation with shiny paper rockets, stars, and moons hanging from the ceiling. The jazz orchestra played with gusto as the staff and their dates danced around the rented hall. They joked and laughed with their colleagues but avoided conversation about Pioneer as much as they could. It wasn’t easy, but they wanted to keep the night carefree. As the drinks flowed, Barbara reminded the single girls to be on the alert. After their long days of working under intense pressure, JPL’s parties could be loose and a little wild. Even in the midst of their revelry, the girls liked to look out for one another.
Thinking back on the year, the staff exulted in the success of Explorer, yet the failed launch just weeks earlier left a bitter taste in their mouths. As Barbara sang Christmas carols with the crowd, her emotions were mixed. However, when she looked at the man standing next to her, she realized she had finally made up her mind. She loved Harry and was ready to marry him. Whatever the new year brings, she thought, at least we’ll be together.
On January 2, 1959, a small sphere could be seen streaking across the sky toward the moon, dragging an orange glowing tail of sodium gas. The gas had been purposely added to increase the satellite’s visibility from Earth. It passed by the moon, coming within four thousand miles of its surface, as close as any human-made object had ever ventured, before swinging into the sun’s orbit. Later named Luna 1, the spacecraft had been designed to land on the moon. Although it didn’t make it quite that far, it was still an impressive win for the Soviets. They boasted that their spacecraft was now a planet, while the computers at JPL grumbled in frustration at the news. They were clearly losing the space race.
On the first anniversary of Explorer 1, in January 1959, a glittery affair in Washington brought Pickering, von Braun, and Van Allen back together in the capital. Von Braun was easily the most famous of the three and used to being the center of attention at such parties. Yet tonight he was grumbling. While JPL had swiftly become part of NASA, von Braun’s group at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, in Alabama, was going to be phased out. NASA wanted to chop the staff in half, holding on to the employees it wanted while shutting down the rest of the operations. Von Braun was not taking the decision well. He had made a public plea for funds—$50 million to $60 million to preserve his group and keep pursuing the big rockets—but he didn’t succeed. Other research groups were also facing corrosion. NASA was transferring 157 employees from the navy’s Vanguard team to what would become the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. Former competitors JPL and the newly minted Goddard would now form the nucleus of NASA space science.
Another celebration was happening back in California. Margie Behrens was getting married. She was twenty years old, and her family had been anticipating her marriage since she finished high school. Macie knew that Margie, a good Catholic girl, would likely be starting a family soon. Macie and the other women thought highly of Margie and fretted over her decision, thinking her too good for her new husband, an engineer at JPL. To tempt her to stay at the lab, Macie sent Margie to learn programming on a brand-new machine: the Burroughs E101.
The device’s capabilities lay somewhere between the massive room-filling computers, such as the UNIVAC and the IBM 701 and 704, and the Friden calculators the women used every day. The big, clunky machine was the size of a desk and very noisy. Margie used a crude assembly language to program it: she stuck pins in a pinboard that sat cradled atop the mechanism. Advertisements for the Burroughs E101 boasted, “Pinboard programming saves 95% of manual computation time!” In addition to its adoption in aerospace engineering, it was also used to forecast U.S. presidential election results. The E101 was made up of eight pinboards, each holding sixteen different instructions. By putting pins in the board, Margie entered the calculations she needed. The women all found the machine painfully slow. It could do twenty additions or four multiplications a second but regularly suffered from breakdowns. Nevertheless, Margie thrilled at using the new technology.
Meanwhile, JPL and von Braun’s group were collaborating on Pioneer 4. On March 3, 1959, the spacecraft launched. This time the first-stage rocket worked perfectly. Back at the control room in JPL, the computers and engineers waited. It would take four and a half hours before the probe passed the moon. The Microlock tracking system that had occupied so many of the computers’ hours worked perfectly. Pioneer 4 joined its Soviet counterpart and began orbiting the sun as a second artificial planet. A few days later, in the wee hours of the morning, they received the last signal ever from Pioneer 4, now more than 400,000 miles away. As the probe traveled on its orbit, the computers considered in amazement the fact that it would be another twelve years before it passed within 1 million miles of Earth.
Advertisement for the Burroughs E101
Although Pioneer 4 was a success, there was a general feeling that the mission had fallen short. JPL had won out over their competitors at the air force, whose two Pioneers had failed utterly, but lagged behind the USSR. The discontent wasn’t just about competition. The staff of JPL, from Pickering to the engineers to the computers, felt driven to begin exploring the planets. Pickering in particular saw the lunar missions merely as a means to test their equipment.
If they were going to explore the solar system, the engineers recognized, they would need a better tracking system for their satellites. They proposed a deep-space network that could command and track all American spacecraft. JPL already had a few tracking stations—in Florida, California, and Puerto Rico—that were responsible for transmitting initial trajectory data from every launch at Cape Canaveral. The cornerstone of the network was the tracking station in California. The huge dish antenna, eighty-five feet wide and weighing 120 tons, was located at Goldstone Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, east of Pasadena. Goldstone had proven its worth by catching Pioneer 4’s signal from the greatest distance: 409,000 miles from Earth. But now they needed to hear even farther into space.
Barbara was about to get her first peek at Goldstone
, the large dish that had provided her with so much data. She had just been promoted to supervisor of the computers. Macie was retiring, and everyone was sad to see her go. She had been there so long that it felt like the end of an era. Still, she was in her late sixties and had modestly declared that she “just can’t keep up with the young women anymore.” Barbara, who had been acting as a supervisor beside Macie for years, was her natural replacement.
Not everyone agreed with the decision, however. One of the engineers, Bill Hoover, grumbled about Barbara’s promotion, believing that a man should be put in charge of what was a critical part of their operations. “She’s just going to get married, get pregnant, and then quit,” he complained angrily.
On her first visit to the Mojave as a new supervisor, Barbara had little time to think of such tactless comments. Instead, she and the engineers discussed plans for the deep-space network, envisioning three stations harboring giant radio antennas, similar to the one at Goldstone, that could be set up in far-flung locations around the world, ready to catch signals from distant space. When the beacon from a spacecraft dipped below one antenna’s horizon, the next antenna would pick it up. The Goldstone antenna would be a central component of the design, and new stations would be built in Australia and Africa.
While Barbara was making these exciting strides in her career, her personal life was also evolving. On February 21, 1959, after making him wait four long years, she finally married Harry Paulson. Standing outside the church together and cheering as loudly as they once had for Explorer’s launch into orbit were her close friends from JPL. Barbara couldn’t have been happier. She only wished her mother were there to see the fulfillment of what she had always wanted for her.
Marriage didn’t change Barbara’s work ethic. It did, however, change her nickname. She had never liked being called Barb or Barbie and preferred that her colleagues call her Barbara. Now, with the addition of her married last name, her initials were BLP. It wasn’t long before she became “Blip” around the lab. Blip spent the same long hours training new computers and working on trajectories. Their next goal was clear, and she eagerly anticipated the calculations. JPL had come in second to the Soviets in launching both the world’s first satellite and the first craft to fly by the moon. Perhaps they could beat the USSR in becoming the first to land on the moon’s surface.
Despite the historic nature of the task, those at JPL found little in the project to admire. There was a feeling among the supervisors that they were simply using the technology out of the box instead of pushing the limits of what they could do. NASA wanted a moon lander quickly, without frills or finesse. To meet both NASA’s requests and their own desires, JPL resolved to work on the moon and planet missions simultaneously. While friction flared between JPL and NASA, the women worked on trajectories for moon landers alongside the more grandiose plans to send probes to Mars and Venus. The excitement over the planetary missions was palpable, and the computers found themselves swept up in it.
One morning, Barbara chose her outfit with particular care. She paired a dark, calf-skimming A-line skirt with a cardigan covering her collared shirt. She slipped on her favorite peep-toe heels and smiled as she put on the three strands of pearls Harry had given her as a wedding present. When she arrived to work, all the girls congratulated her, and one of them pinned a showy corsage to her chest. With her friends and colleagues cheering her on, she walked up to Bill Pickering and shook his hand. “Thank you for the decade of service,” he said warmly as he handed her a shiny gold pin commemorating the years Barbara had worked at JPL. Addressing the staff, Pickering talked of her hard work on the missions and said he hoped she would stick around for many more decades. Barbara grinned; the last year and a half had been wonderful. She had watched as Explorer flew toward the heavens, had gotten the promotion of her dreams, and had married the love of her life. What more could she possibly ask for? One thing was certain: she never wanted to leave the lab.
PART III
1960s
Barbara Paulson
Helen Ling
Susan Finley
Sylvia Lundy (later Miller)
CHAPTER 8
Analog Overlords
Barbara lightly rubbed her belly. The doctor had just left the room. In her hands she held a small piece of paper with a date scrawled in the doctor’s loopy cursive: October 1960. She couldn’t believe it: she was going to be a mother. She stood up and looked in the mirror, wondering if she looked any different. She thought about Harry; he was wild for a baby and would be thrilled at the news. Married life had been blissful. She spent her days in a job she loved and at night she had Harry to come home to. Now everything was going to change.
Barbara got dressed slowly, her mind racing. As she slipped on her kitten heels, she felt overwhelmed. She was thrilled about starting a family, and yet her mind wandered back to the lab. Her whole adult life, ever since she was a teenager, had been spent within JPL’s walls. She was now a supervisor with responsibilities. It would be hard to say good-bye.
Unlike other pregnant women she had seen leave the lab, she couldn’t simply pack up her things and disappear. Her position was too critical to the lab’s success. She discussed the best course of action with her boss, Dr. Clarence R. “John” Gates, who had a PhD in electrical engineering. It was a mark of distinction among the engineers, who were not required to have a graduate-school degree. Congratulating her on her impending motherhood, Gates helped devise their plan. Barbara would work right up until it was time for her to give birth.
The atmosphere at JPL was tense. Just a few months earlier, in September 1959, the Soviets had sent up Luna 2. The spacecraft flew for thirty-six hours before crash-landing on the moon and becoming the first man-made object to land on another celestial body. Now the Soviet Union was boasting of its superiority over the United States. Americans could hardly believe that on the surface of the moon, far above their heads, Luna 2 had placed titanium pennants printed with the USSR emblem. Once again, JPL was playing catch-up.
In December 1959, they suffered another setback. NASA shut down Project Vega, an audacious plan that called for a rocket capable of launching several probes all at once, one bound for the moon, one to Venus, and one to Mars. The computers had spent hundreds of hours working on the project, and the lab had spent nearly $17 million building a new, powerful rocket system. Pickering had planned that 1960 would be devoted almost entirely to Project Vega. Now that the project was canceled, they needed to devise something new.
Since plans for the last launch vehicle JPL would ever devise—and the “propulsion” in the jet propulsion lab—were finished, NASA decided the lab would focus exclusively on spacecraft for lunar and planetary missions. Not that the computers minded; working on spacecraft was more exciting anyway.
With their schedule wide open, JPL hastily made another plan. They would launch five lunar probes, called the Ranger series, in 1960 and 1961. Venus and Mars probes, called Mariner, would follow in 1962. It was easy to get the engineers and computers excited to work on the probes to Venus and Mars, but the moon probes fell short on sparking enthusiasm. With Project Vega now dead, there was worry that the underfunded Ranger’s lunar program might also be on the brink of being cut.
The engineers and computers made their plans over popcorn in the computer room. It had become a gathering place. With the sun slanting in through the large windows, the room was cheery in the afternoons, and the engineers often wandered in to start a conversation. The fact that the room was filled with young women didn’t hurt either. No one was quite sure how the tradition started, but by now it was firmly established. At 3 p.m., the smell of popcorn wafted into the corridor, tempting the engineers to poke their heads out their doors. The computers took turns making it in the tiny kitchenette down the hall. As they talked, they ate the popcorn out of a transparent globe that had been cut in half, the hemispheres still marked with latitude and longitude lines.
They discussed the lunar missions in terms of tec
hnical considerations, but their voices became elevated only when they started talking about the planets. “Why go to that hunk of lifeless rock when we can explore Mars and Venus?” said one of the engineers, a kind, chubby Belgian fellow named Roger Broucke. He sketched out a mission on a piece of paper, a rocket that released a whole set of probes, each bound for a different planet. In one launch they could explore the solar system. “We can send one to the moon too,” he said, almost as an afterthought.
“Well, we’ll need a much more powerful rocket for that, Bubbles,” Barbara replied with a laugh.
Some of the men hung out so often in the computer room that the women gave them girls’ names so they would fit in. Poor Roger was given the unfortunate nickname Bubbles, while Len Efron had been rechristened Leona. Laughing at these pet names, the women jumped into the conversation. With their expertise in calculating trajectories, they estimated how powerful a rocket they would need to get to Mars and Venus. They playfully considered how they would put the rockets together and how many stages it would take to make such a long journey.
The lack of enthusiasm for the Ranger probes was problematic. Yet the finish line for the space race was clear. A human footprint etched into the surface of the moon—which might last a million years or more, far from the effects of gravity and erosion—would be the step over this finish line. It was only a question of whether this footprint would be left by a Russian or an American. But for the United States to achieve the ultimate win in the space race, they first had to get a probe up there. The lab needed to refocus if it was going to help America beat the Soviets.
The computers certainly couldn’t help but show interest in the seven astronauts selected for Project Mercury: Walter M. Schirra Jr., Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, John H. Glenn Jr., Scott Carpenter, Alan B. Shepard Jr., Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, and L. Gordon Cooper Jr. Project Mercury, the States’ first foray into manned spaceflight, had three goals: to orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth, to investigate man’s ability to function in space, and to recover both man and spacecraft safely. Impressed by the group, Wernher von Braun described them in a letter to Pickering: “They are the most wonderful bunch of people you’ve ever seen. No daredevils by a long shot, but serious, sober, dedicated and balanced… but they deeply resent the suggestion that they are human guinea pigs rather than engineering test pilots.” Along with millions of young women across the country, the computers swooned over the handsome group of men.
Rise of the Rocket Girls Page 14