Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  The moons and planets remained mysterious. Space was uncharted territory, the stuff of science fiction. Though Mars and Venus, our closest neighbors in the solar system, held the highest hopes for alien life, most Americans believed even the moon might harbor life. With its basic characteristics, such as temperature and the presence or absence of water, still unknown, it was easy to get lost in fantasy. Hollywood heightened imaginations, producing a steady stream of sci-fi movies in the 1960s with such titles as Twelve to the Moon, Journey to the Seventh Planet, Twenty Million Miles to Earth, and Visit to a Small Planet. Since the only tangible data were those collected from telescopes, the idea of alien creatures hiding in the craters of the moon or in jungles spread across Venus seemed plausible.

  Helen would be one of the first to find out how close these imaginings were to reality. On December 14, 1962, Mariner made its closest approach to Venus. Helen and Melba were anxiously waiting in the control room, and they had good reason to be nervous. They couldn’t be sure if the high temperatures on board the spacecraft had fried its ability to scan the planet. They stood by a large light board on the wall of the control room and hastily wrote equations while tracking the position of the ship. Data began to pour in from the Teletype, the roll of punched paper tape curling under itself. The data came coded in seemingly endless rows of letters: ZXXDRDDRXOS. They worked quickly, calculating the ship’s position mostly by hand but also using the new desk-size IBM 7090.

  As Mariner closed in on Venus, yet another glitch occurred. The control system on board the ship malfunctioned, and the team at JPL had to manually transmit the command for the encounter sequence to begin. As the ship received their command and began to scan the planet, the team members looked at one another in amazement. They were communicating with a spacecraft that was thirty-six million miles away. Helen focused on the task at hand. With data flowing in so quickly, she could spare little time to contemplate the moment’s importance.

  In the control room that night, three distinct groups nervously awaited word of Mariner’s fate. The engineers assessed the operation and position of the spacecraft, looking carefully at the mechanical performance of the ship, while the scientists awaited the data the spacecraft would send back. The computers stood in the middle, their programming simultaneously reporting the ship’s condition and position while unveiling the scientific data. All the information sent back by the spacecraft about Venus’s atmosphere, magnetic field, and charged particle environment would be relayed to Earth in a river of radio signals hitting the high-gain parabolic antenna at Goldstone before being converted to usable data by the women’s telecommunications programming. How well the groups balanced their separate interests would determine not only the current mission’s success but also how well they worked together in the future.

  Around 11 a.m. a strange, chordlike sound was heard as they established radio contact with the spacecraft. Hearing the sounds as they were picked up at the large dish antenna at Goldstone, Bill Pickering said, “Listen to the music of the spheres.” For forty minutes, they did. Data gushed in as Mariner, using infrared and microwave radiation meters capable of breaking through the planet’s dense cloud cover, scanned Venus. They held on to the signal as long as they could, mindful that each additional minute was giving them a wealth of information. Finally, Mariner’s orbit pulled it away from the planet. Helen sat back in awe. She couldn’t believe they had really done it. Out there, soaring through space, was a ship following a path she’d helped map out. Not only that, but they’d beaten the Soviets. It was their first win in the space race, and the victory was precious to all of them. Mariner would inch toward the sun before sending out its last signal on January 3, 1963. After that, JPL would lose contact with it forever as it became just another piece of space junk spinning around the sun.

  While Mariner 2 was sending out its farewell signals, the women watched the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day 1963. One of the floats was a giant planet Venus, constructed in yellow flowers with the words “Venus to Pasadena” written on it in red roses. They watched as a replica Mariner spacecraft, just like the one they built, floated above the big ball of flowers.

  While the computers took pride in their history-making accomplishment, their jobs were in peril. They had been hearing tales that the digital computers they programmed were swallowing up jobs across NASA. At the Dryden Flight Research Center, in nearby Palmdale, California, the human computers were being laid off, despite their long-standing working relationships with the engineers. At the NASA Langley Research Center, in Virginia, the group of computers was similarly shrinking. The more reliable the IBMs became, the greater the threat to the human computers. One of the engineers ominously told Helen, “Your jobs will be gone soon.” All she could do was work harder than ever. Yet in a world where engineers were men and computer programmers were women, everything was about to change.

  CHAPTER 9

  Planetary Pull

  Helen stared at her beautiful baby girl. She gently nestled her daughter in her arms and stroked her silky, dark hair. She was perfect in every way. Helen was already in love with the little girl she and Arthur had named Eve. Her arrival, so soon after their first child, Patrick, sent Helen’s orderly household into complete disarray. Having two little ones was a challenge. She struggled to keep up with her suddenly mobile son as her newborn mewled to be held. Although feeling the pull of her children, Helen didn’t want to lose her job. She loved the work and knew that she couldn’t take off much time. Eve was six weeks old when Helen returned to the lab, leaving the two infants with their grandmother. Yet almost immediately Helen knew it wasn’t going to work. Two babies were simply too much for her parents to handle. They were going to have to figure out something else. “We’ll work swing shifts,” Arthur suggested. It was the best solution. Helen worked early while Arthur worked late. They saw little of each other as they passed back and forth, the days and nights melding into one exhausting stretch of time.

  Helen’s home life was not the only source of stress. The team at JPL was still struggling to get the Ranger program off the ground. Five successive failures had plagued Ranger, and its poor execution had humbled the project in the eyes of NASA, especially when compared to its flashy counterpart, Project Apollo. While Apollo trained its astronauts in the “vomit comet,” an airplane designed to simulate the effects of weightlessness, Ranger couldn’t even capture an image of the lunar surface.

  From its earliest days, the Ranger project lacked the grandeur that distinguished Apollo. In early 1960, JPL’s program director had named Ranger after his Ford pickup truck. At the same time NASA’s chief of Space Flight Programs, Abe Silverstein, was choosing titles for the manned missions to the moon, saying, “I was naming the spacecraft like I’d name my baby.” He chose the Greek god of the sun, Apollo, whose name seemed to match the lofty ambitions of the program.

  The mission’s goal, as defined by President Kennedy in 1961, was to “land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth.” To accomplish this, Apollo would send a three-man spacecraft into lunar orbit. Once it was circling the moon, a second spacecraft, the lunar module, would bring two astronauts down to the surface, leaving one man in the cone-shaped command module. All three astronauts would return to Earth in the command module, parachutes slowing their descent as they splashed down into the ocean. Despite their differences, Ranger and Apollo were faces of the same coin; they were both headed to the moon, one with men aboard and one without. While Project Apollo steadily advanced, NASA worried about their inability to get a lander on the moon. They needed Ranger to work.

  Mechanical problems continued to vex the lunar lander, but the women gave the project little thought. They were running ahead, not looking back, as they began work on a project far more exciting: the first mission to Mars. Much as Mariner 2 had successfully flown by Venus, Mariner 3 would fly by the Red Planet. There was one striking difference in the missions: the distance from Earth to Mars was 140 million miles, roughly four time
s farther than to Venus. They were able to attempt such a feat only because of Mariner 2.

  Mariner 2 had been an unqualified success. The mission gave not only the scientists but the entire world a peek through Venus’s clouds. Yet, instead of finding a jungle teeming with alien life, as predicted in glossy magazine articles, they found temperatures and pressures far too high to sustain any life at all. Unlike Earth and all the other planets of the solar system except Uranus, which rotate in a counterclockwise direction, Venus rotates clockwise on its axis. The women were amazed at how slow this rotation is: a single day on Venus takes up 243 Earth days. The long day means that the planet has no magnetic field. On Earth the hot metal core at the center of the planet, combined with its spin of one revolution every twenty-four hours, generates our magnetic field. The liquid iron, nickel, and other metals surrounding the core swirl, thanks to the Coriolis effect.

  This effect is named for French scientist Gustave de Coriolis, who in 1835 described how water follows a curved trajectory when it encounters the rotating motion of a waterwheel. The effect explains why hurricanes rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. At Earth’s core, whirlpools develop from the swirling liquid metal. Because of the Coriolis effect, the spiraling metal moves in the same direction, generating electrical currents and, ultimately, a magnetic field. Although Mariner discovered that Venus likely has a metal core, which may even be partially liquid, without a faster spin to get it going, it generates no magnetic field. And without a magnetic field, the planet is unable to form the protective cushion of an atmosphere such as that necessary for sustaining life on Earth.

  JPL would use a similar design to Mariner’s for its spaceship to Mars, this time with a camera on board. It would be propelled using the same Atlas-Agena launch vehicle and, just like the Venus missions, it would be constructed in pairs, the twin spacecraft ready for launch within weeks of each other. If one failed, at least they would get another try within a short period.

  They didn’t have much time to launch the spacecraft. As with their challenge with Venus, they had to schedule the launch to catch Mars when it was closest to Earth. While the Venus missions had a fifty-day launch window, the women calculated the Mars missions would have to be launched within twenty-seven days. Otherwise, it would be another two years before they would get another chance. It was going to be tight.

  The team would send the ship into Earth’s orbit to circle the sun before mission control performed a risky midcourse maneuver to send the spacecraft on a course toward Mars. They estimated the journey would take seven and a half months. The computers drew up theoretical trajectories, mapping the direction and speed needed at each critical juncture. They were plotting the longest interplanetary mission ever devised, one that would carry the spacecraft more than 180 degrees around the sun. For the women it was like shooting an arrow at a moving target.

  The computers aimed the spaceship by calculating its altitude and azimuth. The altitude was the height of the ship’s path off Earth’s surface, while the azimuth, like a compass, measured the angle relative to true north at which the ship arced along the horizon. The ship would leave the ground and enter Earth’s orbit before flying into a transitional elongated ellipse. A boost of its rockets, millions of miles from home, would then send the ship flying toward Mars in a path around the sun. It was important that the ship didn’t crash into Mars.

  Normally, all equipment was sterilized before entering space. If scientists wanted to find alien life, they had to be careful not to first contaminate the foreign planet. Otherwise how could they distinguish Martian life from the microbes carried by earthly machines? But unlike the case with previous missions, the Mariner 3 equipment would not be heat-sterilized before launch. Given how long the ride to the Red Planet would take, JPL engineers didn’t want to subject the equipment to the deteriorating effects of extreme temperature. Therefore, they designed Mariner 3’s trajectory so that the chance of its hitting Mars (and possibly contaminating it with Earth germs) was remote.

  While JPL planned the mission, disaster struck. It was just another weekday morning in November 1963 when the news came over the wire. Shots had been fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, and everyone in the lab was glued to the radio. No one could possibly work. Only nine months previously, Kennedy had awarded the lab’s first director, Theodore von Kármán, the country’s inaugural National Medal of Science. Packed into a room that contained the engineers’ offices, the women held hands. When the news anchor announced that Kennedy was dead, they held one another, in shock and sobbing. They knew that neither the country nor the fledgling space program they belonged to would ever be the same.

  A month after Kennedy’s assassination, JPL unveiled a shiny new piece of the space program. Christened the Deep Space Network and known as the DSN, the network of large dish antennas was capable of maintaining a two-way connection between spacecraft and the new Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. It had taken two years to build the SFOF (pronounced “ESS-fof”), a three-story structure that boasted more than two hundred television displays and thirty-one consoles, enough to support tracking from the DSN and serve as a backup for Project Apollo, which was controlled at the NASA center in Houston. From 1963 on, the facility would serve as NASA’s control hub for all interplanetary and deep-space communication. It would receive signals from the antenna located at Goldstone, where Barbara had visited, as well as those in Australia and South Africa, to follow a spacecraft far into the reaches of space. Although a spacecraft transmits at low power, with roughly the same signal strength as a refrigerator lightbulb, the huge curved antenna dishes could concentrate the weak signal. The new network meant that when a spacecraft took a picture, even from millions of miles away, the surge of digital data in the form of ones and zeroes could be caught and sent to the new control room at JPL. In commemoration of the signals streaming in, a plaque was put up in the SFOF reading THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.

  Completion of the DSN was critical to advancing the Mars missions. Yet the pressure to launch the next Mariners while the planets were aligned, combined with JPL’s partiality for the project, meant that Ranger wasn’t always getting the attention it needed. Ranger 6 was launched in January 1964. JPL “parked” the spaceship in Earth’s orbit as planned before sending it out toward the moon. On February 2, the ship neared its planned crash site: the Sea of Tranquility. In the SFOF, engineers and computers waited patiently as the cameras warmed up, already anticipating the thousands of pictures that would be taken as the spacecraft plunged toward the lunar surface. President Lyndon B. Johnson was listening in the White House while officials waited in a special NASA control room in Washington. Suddenly, a strange female voice came over the wire: “Spray on Avon cologne mist and walk in fragrant beauty.” Officials were dumbfounded. Surely this wasn’t coming from the moon. A technician righted the error. He had accidentally crossed the feeds from the ongoing Queen of Outer Space contest (formerly the Miss Guided Missile competition) at JPL. The embarrassment paled in comparison to what the technicians felt when the cameras didn’t turn on. There were no images of the moon to broadcast. Once again, the mission had failed. With this disappointment, JPL worried that the project would be taken away from them and that their standing at NASA had been forever damaged.

  A few days later, after the results were tallied, Pickering crowned the winner of the Queen of Outer Space at the annual dance at JPL. The lab’s becoming part of NASA had changed not only their mission but also the name of their beauty contest. Pickering was still contemplating what NASA administrator James Webb had said to him back in D.C.: “One more flight. You’ve got only one more flight.” This last Ranger mission would determine JPL’s entire future. The gravity of the situation made the lighthearted pageant seem a little dull this year. As Pickering made his way to the stage, the crowd began to clap, slowly at first but then building in intensity until everyone got to their feet, surrounding their boss in
a standing ovation. In the warmth of their confidence, Pickering picked up the microphone and said, “We’re going to fix this. We’re going to make it work.”

  Barbara applauded Pickering, full of respect for her director and enjoying what she assumed would be her last beauty contest. Her focus was on Mariner. She didn’t work on Ranger, so her thoughts lingered on her Mars trajectories. At the same time she was thinking about her family. She was pregnant again. She worked as long as she could, up until she was eight months pregnant and waddling around. This time she didn’t apply for a better parking spot; she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t lose her job prematurely. When she left she felt a twinge of sadness. It was unlikely she would be able to come back, since they couldn’t hold her job for her. With more new IBMs arriving, the women could even be on their way out.

  The human computers worried that their fate would be like that of the women who worked as switchboard operators at JPL. Beloved among the lab’s telephone operators was Sally Crane, who joined the lab even before Barbara, in the mid-1940s. Sitting at the switchboard, she witnessed a complete revolution in JPL’s telecommunications as manual operations switched over to completely electronic ones. Sally held on to the outgoing technology during her last years at JPL before retiring in the 1970s. With the advent of automated operations, the number of switchboard operators in the United States fell 43 percent between 1947 and 1960. It was the beginning of the fall, with hundreds of thousands of switchboard jobs eliminated by new technology. The trend was enough to make anyone working with computers nervous.