Helen was fighting against the menace of obsolescence. She was still hiring women as computers, but the definition of the position had changed. Her team had become NASA’s first computer programmers. The women still worked closely with the engineers, almost all of whom were men, but it was no longer enough for them just to be good at math. They needed to know how to build, fix, and run programs on the IBM computers, something the engineers rarely did. Widening this divide, JPL kept the women’s skills up to date with programming classes. So, while at other NASA centers women’s jobs were fading into the past, the women of JPL were becoming more indispensable than ever with their expertise in computing.
Meanwhile, the lab had figured out why the cameras hadn’t worked on Ranger 6. The problem lay in a midflight ignition that had caused an electrical short in the camera system. With the design issues resolved, everyone looked ahead to Ranger 7. Surely, after six miserable failures, this would be the one. It had to be.
The launch of Ranger 7 took place on a hot, humid afternoon in July 1964. The control room at JPL was tense. Everyone knew that their jobs, and even the fate of the lab, were in jeopardy. To lighten the mood and distract everyone from the pressure, one of the engineers, Richard Wallace, known as Dick, decided to pass out peanuts. Whether it was the good-luck peanuts or simply the hard-won lessons from six failed missions, the launch went off flawlessly. But it wasn’t time to celebrate yet; the ship had to successfully reach the moon’s surface.
A few days later, in the early morning of July 31, Helen sat in the gallery of the new SFOF. The room was packed as everyone anxiously awaited news. As the spacecraft made its deliberate death plunge toward the moon, the cameras warmed up. Suddenly, thousands of images began to pour in. The room erupted in cheers, and everyone jumped from their seats in excitement. Those at JPL were the first to see what the surface of the moon looked like up close. The images revealed a large, dark plain speckled with craters. Seeing this desolate realm stirred happiness in the hearts of the women. They had finally done it.
Now that they had landed a spacecraft on the moon, even if it was a crash-landing, they had to decide where to send the next Ranger. Although a soft landing might seem the next logical step, gently landing a spacecraft wasn’t one of their objectives. Since the program was primarily a reconnaissance mission, they wanted to get as many images as they could. They had to pick an area where a three-foot-long landing pad would fit, in preparation for Apollo. Everyone at JPL had an opinion, and staff debated whether the Sea of Tranquility, the Alphonsus crater, the Mare Vaporum, Sinus Medii, or Oceanus Procellarum would be chosen. The perfect site would balance the scientific goals of JPL with the needs of the Apollo program.
It was the start of a long tug-of-war between scientists and engineers at JPL. The two groups would constantly have to compromise, vacillating between often-opposing goals: the desire for scientific exploration on the one hand versus the development of new technology on the other. During the Ranger missions, Eugene Shoemaker, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and astrogeology teacher at Caltech, was constantly tugging on the rope. Shoemaker’s specialty was astrogeology—a melding of astronomy and geology—and he brought critical expertise to the science team at JPL. He tried to persuade mission managers to move Ranger 8 closer to the moon’s clear, sharp shadow line, the defining edge that separates day from night. The edge, also called a terminator, moves slower on the moon. A day on the moon is equal to 28.5 days on Earth. Just as the low light of a sunset can make for dramatic pictures on Earth, Shoemaker believed, the low angle of the sun would create a contrasting light for the cameras. Engineers, however, argued that there might not be much light at all, which would jeopardize their ability to obtain pictures. The engineers won the round, but Shoemaker kept fighting and ultimately prevailed for the next mission, Ranger 9. The images were as stunning as promised, but the relationship between scientists and engineers continued to be strained.
Image of the moon from Ranger 9 with shadow line separating day from night visible on bottom (Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)
While NASA administrators and JPL scientists discussed landing sites, they were also gearing up for the Mars missions, only a few months away. A few weeks in November were all they had to make Mariners 3 and 4 a success. As they had before, the women watched from a glass-box balcony that looked down on the assembly area while the Mariner spacecraft were constructed. Men in long white coats, caps, and gloves tinkered with the ships. They attached four large solar panels and a crowning antenna before testing all the systems. Watching the designs come together before their eyes was both thrilling and frightening for the computers. They could never be sure if these creations were headed for greatness, would explode into a million pieces, or would simply become floating space junk.
On the evening of November 5, Mariner 3 was ready to go at the former Cape Canaveral, now known as Cape Kennedy. It sat atop the Atlas-Agena rockets on the same launchpad from which Ranger 7 had so recently experienced its success. The team in the control room wasn’t superstitious, but just in case, peanuts were again passed out. While the launch went smoothly, only an hour later there was trouble. No power was coming from the solar panels. The shroud covering the spacecraft hadn’t jettisoned as planned and was now keeping the solar panels from opening. Repeatedly they sent commands to Mariner to drop the pesky piece of fiberglass, but it was too late. Mariner 3 was destined to become space debris.
Now the shroud was all anyone could talk about at JPL. Just as a corpse is wrapped in a funeral shroud, the spacecraft was wrapped up to protect it during the rocket’s ascent through the atmosphere. The shroud was first introduced during the Juno tests, in which a simple strip of aluminum was used. The trick was to make the covering aerodynamic enough not to interfere with the flight, yet strong enough to protect the ship within. Composite materials such as fiberglass soon drew favor, since they were both light and rigid. However, Mariner 3 showed JPL that fiberglass was problematic. The difference in pressure between the shroud’s skin and its honeycomb fiberglass core had prevented the covering from being properly jettisoned. They had to come up with a solution, and fast.
They designed a new shroud, made of metal this time to avoid the pressure problem. Because this changed the weight of the ship, the computers suddenly found that everything had to be recalculated. Modifications would have to be made to the rockets, and therefore the trajectories would have to shift as well. They had only weeks to accomplish everything. The computers worked around the clock as they put the finishing touches on Mariner 4. If they didn’t succeed this time, it would be a two-year wait until they could shoot another spacecraft to Mars.
On November 28 the pad was ready, and the peanuts were passed out. The ship bolted into the sky, the shroud jettisoned, and the solar panels deployed. Just when it seemed that everything was in place for the journey, the space probe fumbled as it got its bearings. The guidance system on board was the first to navigate by the stars. It required that the ship lock on both the sun and the star Canopus. Canopus was chosen because, as the second-brightest star in the sky, it was easy to find. But the ship’s onboard electronics were finding too many bright stars. At JPL, they determined that the guidance system was confusing a few paint chips that had flecked off during deployment with stars. From the ground, the technicians at JPL watched as the guidance system repeatedly locked on to the wrong stars, until, finally, they were able to get the sensors to detect Canopus. Mariner was on its way to the Red Planet. They would have to wait seven and a half months before they knew whether it arrived.
While the Mars mission was monopolizing the attention of those at JPL, the need for moon missions was greater than ever. Ranger 8 reached the moon on February 20, 1965. As the spacecraft plummeted to the surface near the Sea of Tranquility, it sent back thousands of high-resolution photographs of the moon as well as video. At JPL the women watched breathlessly as the moon came closer and closer, the grainy images gradually becoming clear. The bizarre surface stagge
red its observers, with its strange rolling hills and smooth contours that made way for craters atop craters.
Geologists at JPL would have preferred a rockier surface, ripe for scientific exploration, such as the lunar highlands. The highlands form the intriguing spots on the moon that appear bright from Earth. Instead, the landing site near the Sea of Tranquility was chosen for its usefulness to Project Apollo. Finding a flat surface was critical for safely landing crewed spacecraft. The Ranger 8 mission was a success; the pictures showed a surface that looked smooth and strong enough to support the Apollo lander.
Barbara sat watching the television as live video from the last Ranger was broadcast. She was exhausted from running after her girls all day long. Karen was four years old, while Kathy was about to celebrate her first birthday. Between the two, Barbara was kept on her feet. Despite her fatigue, she couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the robotic spacecraft crash into the moon. Along with millions of other Americans, she was mesmerized by the sight of the moon craters rushing toward her. Barbara felt a far-off pride as she thought of her friends at JPL, and yet the moment didn’t belong to her. She hadn’t worked at JPL in a year. Her time as a computer seemed distant now that she was absorbed by the demands of home and family.
Helen also felt tired. It wasn’t easy balancing a career with her two little kids, not yet in school. Her hours at work were getting longer as Mariner 4 approached Mars. She was constantly recalculating the trajectory, ensuring that their computations were correct and preparing for the ship’s midcourse correction. Many Americans believed that Mars was a sister planet to Earth, likely to be a home for intelligent life. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the astronomer Percival Lowell published three books about life on the Red Planet, basing his conclusions on his sighting of “canals” when observing Mars through his telescope. Although he wasn’t the first astronomer to see long, thin channels cutting across the surface, his descriptions of them and the Martians who made them were vivid. The world anxiously awaited the first views from the probe, and many were certain they were about to see the first glimpses of alien life.
On the evening of July 14, 1965, Mariner sailed by Mars. For twenty-two minutes Helen sat in the uncomfortably quiet control room as the data rushed in. Unlike the situation with the Ranger missions, where they could watch the images as they arrived, Mars was too far away. The digital image data came in as strips of paper that had to be processed by IBMs to produce images. The team members couldn’t possibly wait that long. They decided to construct their own picture. They printed out the strips of data on ticker tape and hung them on the wall. Each number in the data corresponded to the brightness of its pixel, short for “picture element.” The colors ranged from light to dark on a scale of twenty-five to fifty. When Dick Grumm, one of the engineers, went to buy chalk, the clerk told him they didn’t have any, but he could use pastels instead.
Using brown, red, and yellow pastels, the engineers made up a key for how the numbers should be colored and got started. It was like a giant paint-by-numbers, and Dick was careful to follow his color key. It wasn’t an easy project: the image was two hundred lines of two hundred pixels per line, an impressive amount of coloring to do. Meanwhile, the public relations folks at JPL were getting nervous. How could they keep the media away from the pretty artwork and make them wait for the official black-and-white images? It turned out they couldn’t. Not only were Helen and the engineers excited by the early glimpse of Mars, but so were the television crews. They filmed the hand-drawn picture and broadcast it to the world; the first-ever image of Mars was radiant in red and brown pastels.
The formal black-and-white images were processed over the next few days. They revealed no canals of an alien civilization. Instead the planet was littered with craters reminiscent of the moon’s. It looked like a desert. An editorial in the New York Times declared, “Mars is probably a dead planet.” Yet at JPL hope still remained that a future mission might uncover some remnant of life, perhaps clinging to a crater or bubbling in a warm spring.
In the midst of the Mars excitement, Barbara once again got a call from Helen. They needed her at JPL, and Helen asked, “Wouldn’t you like to come back?” Barbara missed both the lab and the companionship and said she’d be thrilled to return. She was already thinking about potential babysitters. Coming back the second time, she found the computers had grown even more sophisticated. To regain her skills she took programming classes offered at Caltech and sponsored by JPL. The lab’s association with the university was convenient in keeping the computers, both living and wired, up to date. The women frequently took programming-language courses and also held classes in the lab. Helen was always first in learning the programs, eager to pass on what she had learned to her staff.
Barbara’s friend Kathy Thuleen was back after having kids as well. In a society where only 20 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home, the women at JPL bonded over their new babies at lunchtime. The talk naturally flowed from the moon to Mars to first words and first steps. While chatting over developmental milestones, they could feel the mood changing in the lab. The engineers were asking them for analyses of increasing difficulty and allowing them greater independence. With their growing responsibilities, the computing section’s work was finding its way into numerous publications, although they were rarely credited in academic journals. Roger Bourke, one of the engineers, felt the injustice. He wondered what he could do to include his colleagues, hindered only by gender. At the same time that they were being denied the full recognition they deserved, it seemed to the young mothers, their work was more important than ever.
Kathy was working closely with Roger, analyzing the mountain of data that Mariner 4 had sent back to Earth. Hovering between the engineering and scientific worlds at JPL, they were uncovering the mysteries of the Martian atmosphere. They discovered that the atmosphere was only one half of 1 percent as dense as Earth’s and that the polar caps that resembled the North and South Poles of Earth were actually frozen carbon dioxide. They determined that, like Venus, Mars lacked a robust magnetic field. However, unlike Venus, which lacks a magnetic field due to its slow rotation, Mars owed its weak magnetic field to its solid core. Without liquid metal that swirls charged particles, like that at the core of Earth, Mars was left without the protection from the solar wind that an atmosphere provides.
The more responsibility Kathy gained in her work—calculating the Martian ionosphere and gravitational effect—the more enthralled she became. Roger recognized these contributions by adding her name to their next paper, which detailed the altitude-control system on board Mariner 5. Kathy gasped when she read “Kathryn L. Thuleen, engineer” on the title page. She had never seen that word, engineer, after her name before.
Kathy was at her desk with one of the Mariner calculations when she got a frantic call. It was their babysitter. “Your son’s up in a tree and can’t climb back down,” the sitter cried. “I don’t know what to do.” Kathy didn’t know what to do either. Her husband was only ten minutes away, so perhaps he could leave work. The couple fretted over the phone until they finally thought to call a friend of their son’s. The young boy was able to coax their child down, and all was well. Still, Kathy felt the nagging guilt of being a working mom. It was horrible to think she wasn’t there when she was needed.
Luckily, JPL was willing to bend to her and the other mothers’ needs. Kathy and Barbara both got to the lab early in the morning, often startling the deer that wandered through the parking lot looking for breakfast. They conscripted their husbands to drop the kids off with the babysitter. In the early hours they enjoyed the quiet, with the only sounds those of their pencils scratching across paper and the quiet hum of the IBMs in the room next door. In the late afternoon, they rushed home, eager to spend time with their children. The flexibility JPL gave them to shift their hours as needed, coming in early and leaving early, was invaluable. The job was never about sitting at a desk from nine to five. Instead, it
was about getting the work done.
While the women were getting the support they needed at work and home, a new JPL project—the Surveyor program—was created to support Project Apollo. The engineers joked about putting a sign on its back, FOLLOW ME, to help keep the astronauts on course. Its goal was to produce a spacecraft that could softly land on the moon instead of crashing into it. If they were going to send men up there, they would have to learn to land them gently.
The Surveyor looked like a long-legged white tripod with two large solar panels at the top. Attached to the body of the ship, just above the tripod legs, were steerable rocket thrusters, the first of their kind. Using radar and an autopilot system, the engines were able to slow the ship down considerably, making a soft landing possible. An antenna was mounted near the panels to transmit images from the two television cameras housed below. Even though by now Ranger 9 had been launched and successfully transmitted live video from the moon’s surface, there was considerable nervousness about broadcasting Surveyor’s delicate landing and photography live. On May 30, 1966, the launch went as planned. Two and a half days later the women watched as the lander approached the moon. The thrusters on board the ship fired as planned, slowing it from nearly 6,000 miles per hour to just 3. The spacecraft softly landed on the lunar surface. At JPL, one of the television network people leaned in to Bill Pickering and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re live all over the world.” Although he always knew the event would be broadcast live, the words shook Pickering; it had to work. An hour later the ship started taking pictures. The mission was flawless.
The next Surveyor mission wouldn’t go as smoothly. During the midcourse correction, which had been carefully plotted by the women, one of the rockets failed to fire. The spacecraft tumbled out of control. It was a frustrating setback, especially since the first Apollo mission was slated for launch in mere months.
Rise of the Rocket Girls Page 18