In preparation for the first mission, the Apollo crew had a practice session in January 1967. The cone-shaped Apollo command module sat atop a giant Saturn rocket, divided into two stages to form a launch vehicle powerful enough to lift men into space. The test was a launch simulation, with conditions as close as possible to a real launch: all components assembled and systems up and running. Dressed in their white and silver space suits, three astronauts—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—crossed the red metal bridge and climbed into the command module. The hatch was shut behind them, and they drank in the rich atmosphere, approximately 100 percent oxygen. They lay back flat in their seats and looked up at the controls.
It was a long day of testing in the cramped space. Nearly eleven hours later the astronauts were gearing up for the simulated final countdown. The count was held at T minus 10 minutes as they resolved a communications problem that had popped up. Everything seemed to be operating normally until the launch team at the blockhouse suddenly heard a voice yell, “Fire! We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” The next words came through garbled as crew members ran to rescue the astronauts. The flames started slowly but picked up before curling underneath the hatch door. Feeding on the oxygen-rich air, the fire consumed the command module. The rescuers were too late; the men inside were already dead.
The accident was nearly Apollo’s undoing. The emotional toll of this loss of life caused several NASA officials to resign, unable to resume their work. Some feared that Congress might cancel the Apollo program, especially after a congressional investigation placed part of the blame for the accident on NASA’s failure to report problems with Apollo. Ultimately, investigations by NASA and Congress would find that a spark ignited accidentally in the capsule, likely near Grissom’s seat. Because of the oxygen-laden atmosphere and abundance of flammable materials inside, the fire quickly raged out of control. Tragically, the hatch door was too cumbersome to open quickly and prevented the astronauts’ escape. The three men had asphyxiated in their space suits, their bodies protected from the flames around them but deprived of air to breathe.
Barbara and her colleagues were horror-struck when the news made its way to JPL. The three young men reminded them of their husbands, especially since they were roughly the same age, in their thirties and forties, with young children at home. It was heartbreaking. The Apollo program was put on hold, and a feeling pervaded the country that perhaps landing a man on the moon was reaching too far. Yet at JPL the tragedy had the opposite effect. They had to make the next Surveyor mission a success. The manned missions needed a boost of confidence, and it was up to them to show that the landing could be performed safely.
With the Apollo disaster at the forefront of their minds, the team watched Surveyor 3 blast off from Cape Kennedy in April 1967. Following its planned trajectory, the ship made two big bounces on the moon’s surface before settling down in a crater. Unlike the previous Surveyors, this one was equipped with a shovel. It dug small trenches and scooped up dirt, placing it in front of the camera. Back at JPL, more than two hundred thousand miles away, Margie Behrens worked late that night in the control room, reducing the data that came in from the spacecraft. This meant that she converted the stream of data from analog to digital, revealing the texture and strength of the materials that made up the moon.
Margie and the team at JPL were pioneers in digital-image processing. Using FORTRAN and later a program called VICAR, they programmed the IBM 7094 to convert each square of the analog image, taken by cameras pointed at the moon, into dots, or pixels. For JPL it was a necessity. Without digital processing, the terrain of the moon and planets was an indistinct blur. By compensating for distortion in the digital data, they could produce clean, crisp images.
Surveyor 3 had provided the first in-depth look at the composition of the moon and discovered a landing site well suited for an Apollo spacecraft. The success of the lunar lander lifted spirits, giving Americans hope for manned missions there.
Even as Barbara marveled at these new developments, she was enjoying the fruits of other advances right at home. Sitting at her desk, calculating new trajectories for their planetary missions, she ran a finger over her pantyhose. The hosiery was brand-new, uniting panties with nylons for the first time. For decades, Barbara had worn her stockings with a garter belt like any proper woman as she headed to work or went out in the evening. To put it mildly, it was a pain.
The garter belt was uncomfortable, often digging into a woman’s stomach and legs. Pantyhose came about in the late 1950s when Ethel Boone Gant had had enough. She told her husband on an overnight train from New York City to their home in North Carolina that she wouldn’t be accompanying him on trips any longer. She was pregnant, and the tight garter belt was far too uncomfortable to bother with. Yet she couldn’t leave the house without her hosiery. Her husband, Allen Gant Sr., ran a textile company and wondered if he could use his expertise in the industry to solve her problem. “How would it be if we made a pair of panties and fastened the stockings to it?” From that conversation, Panti-Legs, later known as pantyhose, were born and began lining shelves in 1959. They started catching on in the 1960s, when the increasingly popular miniskirt couldn’t cover the edge of garter belts and new fabrics made them far more comfortable and convenient.
While Barbara didn’t intend to start wearing miniskirts, there was a new style she wanted to try. She loved the beautiful pantsuits she saw in store windows and would stop to admire the slim-fitting outfits, displayed in a plethora of colors and designs. But she wasn’t brave enough to buy one to wear to work yet.
Barbara was happy to see Margie again. She was back after having had three babies in three years. She’d found a neighbor who could watch the children during the day. They chatted about their children but also about the new fashions. One day they noticed that Bill Pickering’s secretary was wearing a pantsuit. “Well, surely if she’s wearing one we can get away with it too?” Barbara said to Margie. They bought the pantsuits and wore them to the lab, feeling both beautiful and slightly scandalous. They had never worn slacks to work before.
While trying out their new fashion-forward outfits, they were also debugging programs. A computer bug was a problem in the code. The term had been coined by Thomas Edison and then popularized by navy rear admiral Grace Hopper while she worked as a research fellow at Harvard University. On the evening of September 9, 1947, the operators of a Mark II computer at the university were having trouble with the machine. Upon investigating, they found a moth trapped in the relay points of a panel. They jokingly taped the dead insect in their lab notebook, noting “First actual case of bug being found.” After that night they loved to kid that they were debugging their computer program, and the term spread.
Debugging a program at JPL in the 1960s simply meant talking through the problems. Margie would sit with Barbara, and they would run through the programs one command at a time. With each line of code she explained her reasoning. “I divided the integer here,” Margie would say. Each equation, each string of text, was thought through logically. As Margie described the program aloud step-by-step she would usually come across the error herself. Even if she didn’t catch it, her friend Barbara was there listening and would be sure to spot it.
But while Margie could rely on her colleagues at work as much as ever, at home she could feel her marriage slipping away. Her teenage fantasies of romance had subsided into apathy. She and her husband were an ill-matched couple who couldn’t seem to get along. The worse her marriage got, the more she felt the need to work. She knew that if they were to split, she’d need her financial independence, made possible by her job at JPL.
Leaving the lab at the end of the day, she laughed when another computer said to her, “Now we go home and really work.” It was said in jest, but Margie knew it was only too true. Day after day, she would get home from the lab and rush to make dinner, give the kids a bath and get them to bed, then wash the dishes and do the laundry. At 10 p.m. she’d get into her pajamas a
nd feel exhausted from head to foot. Being a working mother was always hard, but unlike Barbara and Helen, she didn’t have an equal partner at home. The man she chose at nineteen had no interest in helping out around the house. Margie sighed and wondered how much more she could take. She knew something had to give.
Against the dark blue of a morning sky on April 4, 1968, Apollo 6 blasted off into space. There were no men inside; instead this flight would test the ability and safety of the three-stage Saturn-V rocket launch vehicle. The launch suffered from setbacks: first, just two minutes after liftoff the frame of the rocket vibrated dangerously. Meanwhile, a manufacturing flaw meant that structural panels began to fall off the lunar module adapter. Then two of the five second-stage engines didn’t fire and the third stage didn’t ignite at all. Still, the Apollo spacecraft reached a peak of 13,810 miles above Earth. The command module, where astronauts would one day sit, splashed down safely in the Atlantic.
But there would be no celebration. An hour after the crewless spacecraft fell into the ocean, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot in Memphis, Tennessee. The assassination stunned the country. Barbara, Margie, and their team struggled to understand why this tragedy had happened. It was difficult to keep their minds on space when things on Earth were falling apart.
CHAPTER 10
The Last Queen of Outer Space
The wind whipped through Sylvia Lundy’s hair, and the sun sparkled on the windshield. Sylvia smiled as the little car rumbled down the road. She loved exploring in the summertime. She couldn’t be sure what was ahead, and yet she was leaving everything behind. Any road trip in the Volkswagen Bug was a gamble, but this trip, all the way from New Jersey to California, was a real adventure. For the first time, Sylvia was leaving her family home. She looked over at her new husband behind the wheel and tenderly touched his hand. The newlyweds relished the freedom of the open road. They got lost, driving down dirt tracks, the map becoming worn and crinkled as the miles accumulated. They visited family and then picked cities on a whim; as long as they were heading west, they didn’t care how they got there.
Sylvia had always loved to travel. Even as a child she felt the lure of leaving familiar places. After her family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was only three, her older sisters wrestled with the language and culture, but Sylvia slid right into their new life. Her father had a doctorate in public health from MIT and was working for the U.S. government, bringing his knowledge of epidemiology and sanitation to educators. Her mother graduated with a degree in education, having taken many classes in chemistry and math. While Sylvia’s father earned his PhD in Massachusetts, she had taught school, supporting him. In Brazil she was busy running the household. She took the girls’ education seriously and worried a little about Sylvia, who wasn’t a very good reader.
They moved to a house on the beach in Ipanema. Close in age, the three girls—known affectionately as Berta, Barbie, and Sally—built sandcastles together and splashed in the water. The white-sand coast stretching into the dark azure surf was spectacular. But while the warm water tempted them, the massive, powerful waves made swimming dangerous. The beach so terrified the girls that they sometimes had nightmares about being pulled down by the surf.
The family fell in love with Brazil, taking visitors on tours of Rio, including to the top of Mount Corcovado to see the famous Christ the Redeemer statue. Sylvia’s father traveled around Brazil for work while the rest of the family stayed in the capital city, the girls attending English schools. Although their father was hoping for a transfer to India, four years later they moved again, this time to Mexico City. With the move, their parents were getting more serious about the children’s education. Sylvia felt the expectation that one day she would follow in her father’s footsteps and earn her doctorate. In preparation, as her mother tucked her in at night, she gave Sylvia math puzzles to solve. Sylvia would fall asleep with the numbers still running through her mind.
Sylvia was almost nine years old when they moved back to the United States for her father’s work. Only a few weeks after moving to New Jersey, he collapsed from a heart attack. His heart was weak, possibly made weaker from their time living at high elevation in Mexico City. His death was devastating; the girls desperately missed him.
Now it was up to Sylvia’s mother to support the young family. She got a job as a secretary to the assistant dean at Douglass College, the prestigious all-female sister school of Rutgers University. Her hands full and with three girls to educate, Sylvia’s mother knew that if she worked for the university she could send her girls to college tuition-free. The perk motivated the once-itinerant family to put down roots. The sisters became known in the college town as “the girls from Ipanema,” every bit as graceful and lovely as in the popular song.
Sylvia lived at home while attending Douglass. She still wasn’t a great reader, but she loved math. She loaded up on advanced courses in calculus. For some classes she went to the all-male Rutgers, rushing to the bus to get to her physics class on time. By her senior year, Rutgers was offering a new class: a full-year course in computing. Sylvia loved it. She learned programming on an IBM 1130, and although it was complicated, it also felt like a game or an enormous puzzle whose pieces she needed to fit together. Her teacher was a systems engineer at IBM, an inspiring mentor named Mrs. Droege.
Sylvia was doing more than earning her degree. She was also falling in love. She had been dating David, a Rutgers student and an engineering major, since her freshman year, and now that she was graduating, marriage seemed inevitable. Both her sisters had married immediately after finishing college; now it was her turn. She and David married in June 1968 and then took off for California, where David planned to study engineering at Caltech.
Once in California, Sylvia started looking for a job. A friend at church mentioned a section called Mission Design at JPL and suggested that Sylvia apply. When it came time for her interview, Helen Ling was out that day, so Barbara Paulson filled in. Her warm, friendly manner made an immediate impression on Sylvia. She knew she wanted to be part of Barbara’s group.
Barbara was impressed with Sylvia’s math degree and experience in FORTRAN and told Helen they needed to hire her. Although JPL had rejected Sylvia’s formal application for reasons unknown, Barbara saw her worth. They offered her a job, and Sylvia officially became one of Helen’s girls.
It was 1968, and the women were gearing up for another go at Mars. Mariner 6 and 7 would be the latest craft to fly by the Red Planet. The computers eagerly plotted the spacecraft’s trajectories and programmed the instruments that would probe the planet from space in search of extraterrestrial life. Helen was doing contingency planning, just in case something went wrong with the ship and they had to reroute it. She plotted out new paths using star maps. Instead of the latitude and longitude used to plot location on Earth, Helen used the celestial coordinates, declination and right ascension, to plot positions. She drew the contours on cumbersome eleven-by-seventeen-inch charts, spending long hours on the project even as she hoped that her work would never be used.
Margie was also putting in long hours. She was uniting data from all over the lab to improve signal strength between JPL’s spacecraft and the ground. One of her duties was to send out memos to keep the lab abreast of their progress. It was the first time she had taken direct ownership of a project, and she was proud of seeing her name on the updates sent all around the lab. Because of her involvement in this project, she got the nickname dB counter, since signal strength was measured in decibels, or dB. She laughed at the new moniker; at least it isn’t Bubbles, she thought to herself. She also worked closely with the spacecraft-assembly facility and wrote programs to convert the data collected on tape from the spacecraft’s photographic equipment into information the image-processing lab could turn into pictures. Her software was working well. Her marriage, however, was over.
Margie’s friends at JPL had been right: she was too smart for her husband. She had tried her best but couldn’t save her mar
riage. In the wake of her divorce, Margie felt lonely and isolated. She worried about her four children. Although she felt as though she was the only person in the world splitting with her partner, divorce was actually experiencing a surge of nearly 50 percent in the United States. When California’s Family Law Act passed in 1969, it made no-fault divorces possible in the state. And it wasn’t just in California—across the country, laws allowing couples to separate solely because of “irreconcilable differences” were opening up the option to divorce, especially to women who felt trapped by marriage. As Margie grappled with her decision, she thought, I’ll still have my kids and my job.
Sue Finley, on the other hand, felt nothing. Her mind was slipping away from her. She had been home for six years taking care of her two boys, and while she loved them both dearly, she felt she was going crazy. She tottered along, trying to keep it all together, but she was overwhelmed by feelings of fear and anxiety. She began meeting with a psychologist, who listened to her patiently and then prescribed an unusual therapy. She didn’t need clinical treatment, he said; what she needed was to return to work. “It’ll be better for the children,” he explained. Sue nodded. She was ready to go back. Having a job she was proud of and doing work she was good at made her feel strong and purposeful. She loved being a mother more than anything, but she had missed that feeling.
In the six years since Sue had left the lab, much had changed. To prepare, she spent months studying manuals, trying to catch up with the new computer-programming languages. FORTRAN 66 had become an industry standard. For the first time, every new IBM could use the same computing language instead of programming being unique to each machine. As she immersed herself in the new technology, Sue could feel the sense of madness drift away. Returning to JPL and her friends, she was thankful to have no feelings of guilt at leaving her children. Her psychologist had told her this was a medical necessity, and it also helped that so many of her colleagues were working mothers. She turned to Helen, Barbara, and the recently returned Merrilyn Gilchrist when she needed support.
Rise of the Rocket Girls Page 19