While Sue was regaining her sanity and her life in the lab, men were about to walk on the moon. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to tread on another planetary body. The computers’ fingerprints were all over the historic mission. Their legacy began with the rocket that flew the men up there. It blasted off in stages, a technique made possible by the women’s computations for the world’s first two-stage rocket, JPL’s Bumper WAC. The rocket itself was a successor to the one they had helped advance for the Explorer satellites. A special propellant that needed no ignition fueled the Apollo rocket. The computers had helped develop this novel substance, called hypergolic fuel, when working on liquid propellants for the Corporal. Of course, the Ranger and Surveyor missions they had recently launched were key in determining landing sites for the Apollo missions. And when Neil Armstrong stood on the surface of the moon and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” the voice transmission back to Earth was received because of tracking stations in California and Australia, part of the Deep Space Network that the computers had worked on so faithfully. Apollo 11 was the culmination of a thousand successes, each one building on the next, stretching up into the beyond.
The women watched the first steps on the moon with the same mixture of awe and wonder as millions of other Americans. Yet modestly, they didn’t think about their own handiwork in making it happen. Instead, they were lost in the magic of the moment, glued to the grainy images on their televisions, scarcely believing their own eyes.
Nine days later, it was time to see Mars. Mariner 6 was about to meet the Red Planet, in what JPL called a planetary encounter. Margie waited nervously in the control room. It was the first time they would be able to see live images from another planet, thanks to the high-rate telemetry system she had helped program. Data came streaming in from the spacecraft to the giant antenna at Goldstone as it flew only 2,000 miles from the surface of Mars and more than 40 million miles from Earth. It was late at night, but Margie wasn’t sleepy. As she watched the images coming in real time, excitement coursed through her. Each image revealed new details. The poles, similar to our own North and South Poles, jumped out in white, giving the planet an Earth-like appearance. As the spacecraft got closer, however, the cameras showed a strange topography the scientists called chaos terrain. There were cratered deserts, strange collapsed ridges, and mysterious concentric circles that looked like huge bull’s-eyes.
The information JPL was gaining about Mars was beyond anything they had learned before. While cameras captured the alien terrain, spectrometers and radiometers were analyzing the Martian atmosphere. The new scientific experiments revealed a planet that, with its craters, resembled the moon superficially but otherwise was quite different. The mission quashed any hope of finding complex life on Mars. Temperatures were freezing, and there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere and no vegetation to be seen. Mariner 6 revealed an ancient planet with an extremely thin atmosphere.
It was a blow not only for scientists, some of whom had mistaken a seasonal dust storm for vegetation coming back to life in the Martian spring, but also for popular culture. It flew in the face of what H. G. Wells wrote in The War of the Worlds: “The vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant color, is of a vivid blood-red tint.” The fascinating and frightening aliens who populated Mars, famous in both movies such as Invaders from Mars and The Day Mars Invaded Earth and books like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, were not a possibility.
Yet the dream of finding another world capable of supporting life was not so easily crushed. There was still a chance that simple life-forms might lurk somewhere on the planet. Just as bacteria live in extreme conditions on Earth, such as in volcanic vents and the ice of Antarctica, as we know they do today, it was possible that similar life could be found on the alien planet. The problem was, JPL would have to get much closer, dig into the planet, and take and analyze samples to find it. This would require a much more complex approach. The need to discover life on Mars, to find companions in the universe, was fast becoming an obsession, one that would persist for decades.
Sylvia had little time to appreciate the beauty of Mars. She was going to night school, and her days had become a blur of work, school, and home. Everyone at JPL, especially Helen, had been encouraging her to get her master’s in engineering. Twice a week she attended a three-hour class. She enjoyed the coursework and loved the fact that many of her teachers were engineers from JPL. On the other nights, she tried to keep up with her homework. It wasn’t easy. She and David were living in a furnished one-bedroom apartment that was cramped and had no dishwasher or other modern amenities. At least its small size meant she didn’t have much to clean. However, the other household chores—all the grocery shopping and cooking—left Sylvia overwhelmed. David was busy at Caltech, with no time for these tasks. Under the weight of her daily life, it seemed inevitable that something would break.
Although Sylvia joined JPL during the age of IBM, in the lab the women were still hand-plotting, manually calculating each spacecraft’s trajectory before drawing the path in their notebooks. She had never performed that kind of work before, and some of the women laughed at her as she struggled to put mechanical pencil to paper. The paper was thin, so Sylvia tried not to make mistakes. Whenever she erased, which was often, the eraser tore tiny holes in the paper, evidence that she needed more practice.
Sylvia wasn’t just calculating on paper. She was programming for what promised to be the most exciting project at JPL yet: the Grand Tour. The audacious project would take advantage of a rare event due to take place in the late 1970s: a once-every-176-year alignment. This occurrence would bring the outer planets of the solar system close to one another at just the right times, shrinking what was a thirty-year voyage to Neptune to one of only thirteen years. JPL wanted to send two probes bound for the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. An untested maneuver called gravity assist, like a giant game of leapfrog through the solar system, would make this possible.
Dick Wallace, the engineer who introduced peanuts to the control room, explained the concept to Sylvia. “It’s like a big gravity slingshot,” he said. He described how a spacecraft can gain speed as it approaches a planet because the planet’s gravity pulls on it. Since the planet is also orbiting the sun, the spacecraft can borrow some of its orbital angular momentum. Therefore, if you sent the spacecraft on the right trajectory, it would curve around the planet, getting faster and faster as it flew away. If they plotted the trajectories perfectly, they could send their probes all over the solar system. Because of gravity assist and the upcoming alignment of the planets, they could accomplish this exploration with significantly less fuel, and consequently less cost, than previously believed. JPL pitched the project to NASA, highlighting the budgetary advantages.
In November 1969, Apollo 12 approached the moon. Charles “Pete” Conrad and Alan L. Bean were looking out the window as they neared the surface. When the lander made a wide turn, Pete couldn’t believe what he saw dead ahead. There was Surveyor 3, whose mission had ended two years earlier. The astronauts picked up the pieces of the robotic spacecraft whose success, although dimmed by time, had paved the way for men to walk on the moon. They packed up the parts, exactly as they had been specially trained to at JPL, and placed them in the ship. Surveyor 3 would be the only lunar space probe to make its way back home.
With the 1960s coming to a close, a new president was in the White House. It was clear to the computers that Richard Nixon saw NASA not in terms of its scientific value but as a partisan political pawn, and specifically as a Kennedy endeavor. This was evident when, soon after taking office, Nixon shut down a NASA lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and slashed the space agency’s budget. The Grand Tour was canceled.
JPL wasn’t giving up on their plan to explore the solar system. They couldn’t let the rare planetary alignment pass them by. Following the cancellation, a small group of engineer
s met in secret one weekend. They had to come up with a low-cost way to make the Grand Tour possible. Sylvia worked on the programming challenges. Instead of splitting the mission into two probes, each bound for different planets of the outer solar system, they would design a spacecraft and trajectory that could tour all of them in one astounding expedition. The group worked into the wee hours that weekend, devising trajectories and exploring the programming that would govern such a trip.
Their biggest challenge was figuring out how to fly by Saturn. They had to calculate the path perfectly if they were going to get enough momentum to make it the rest of the way to the other outer planets. Sylvia started writing a program called post-E, which stood for “post-encounter.” Their plan was coming together. By Monday morning Sylvia felt the thrill of success. They had come up with an ambitious but feasible plan that significantly cut costs, and her boss, Roger Bourke, was now presenting the scheme to NASA administrators. She crossed her fingers and hoped the meeting would go well. She wanted to continue working on the program.
While Sylvia was devising a Grand Tour of the solar system, her marriage on Earth was faltering. Just like Margie, she reacted by delving deeper into her work, finding comfort in the challenge of uncovering the mysteries of the universe. Her work stood in contrast to the tedious daily strife with her husband. They didn’t have any children; if she was going to leave, she should do it now. Pulled between her career and her marriage, she knew she couldn’t possibly save both. Working late at night in the lab, she would think about David and his long hours spent only a few miles away, at Caltech. It seemed strange to her that two people who shared a home and a life could know so little about each other. Suddenly her feelings were clear; she had to leave him.
Along with Sylvia’s and Margie’s marriages, a tradition was ending at JPL. The lab’s last Queen of Outer Space beauty contest was held. The competition and dance seemed to belong to a different era. Even to Barbara, once a runner-up when the contest was known as Miss Guided Missile, the event seemed outdated. As the final winner was crowned, protests over gender equality were sweeping the country.
The year 1970 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. In recognition, the National Organization of Women held a Women’s Strike for Equality. The strike took place in forty states, with twenty thousand people marching up Fifth Avenue in New York City. They held signs declaring WE ARE THE 51% MINORITY and HOUSEWIVES ARE SLAVE LABORERS. The protests put pressure on Congress to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would constitutionally guarantee equal rights for women. Their role was changing so quickly that many women were left bewildered. A female real estate agent watching one of the protests told Time magazine, “I don’t know what these women are thinking of. I love the idea of looking delectable and having men look at me.” Although the changes prompted confusion for some, the effects of women’s liberation were spreading everywhere, even to the offices of JPL.
The women’s titles were shifting. Known as computers since the lab’s inception, they were now officially engineers. It was a breakthrough as big as landing on the moon. Their work had been steadily increasing in importance for years, and now they had the title to match their experience. For women like Helen, Barbara, and Margie, who had worked there for years, it was worth far more than anything a beauty pageant title could possibly bestow.
Armed with her new professional title, Margie was working on Mariner 10, which would visit both Mercury and Venus. On its way to the smallest planet of the solar system, Mercury, the ship had to pass behind Venus. The problem was that if the spacecraft was behind the planet, the engineers couldn’t detect its signal or correct its course. Margie had to find some kind of solution. She devised a strategy wherein the radio signal from the ship would bend around the planet as long as the spacecraft was oriented toward Earth. She carefully calculated the position of the spacecraft and that of the antennas back home. With her team, she also figured out how to use Venus’s gravitation to her advantage. Falling toward the sun is relatively easy, but if you want to visit Mercury you can’t drop too fast. Like a restraint, the pull of Venus would slow the ship so it could orbit the planet closest to the sun. It would be the first mission to use gravity assist. When Margie struggled with some parts of the program, she did what she had always done—asked the other women. She loved having her friends to rely on. Using all the components of the DSN, she was able to map out a trajectory that would allow Mariner to make the first exploration of Mercury
Sylvia was also working on the project, creating computer animations to visualize where the ship would travel. With these, she helped plan the ship’s trajectory. Where would the spacecraft go after orbiting Mercury? One idea came from an unusual source: a visiting Italian engineer named Giuseppe Columbo. At a conference on Mariner 10 in 1970, held at JPL, Columbo suggested that they might be able to achieve a second encounter around the planet. Working with the other engineers, Sylvia found Columbo was right and calculated a trajectory that allowed Mariner to loop around Mercury a second time, to capture even more of the planet with its cameras.
Margie and Sylvia watched as Mariner 10 launched from Cape Kennedy on November 3, 1973, bound to study the atmosphere and surface of Mercury. It would be months before either knew if her plan had worked.
Meanwhile Helen was devising a plan of her own. Although she and the other women were grandfathered in as engineers, all new hires for that department had to have a degree in engineering. Engineering programs were only just starting to accept women as students—Caltech’s had done so in 1970—but while the doors were finally open, few women were walking through them. That year, women earned fewer than 1 percent of engineering degrees nationwide. Given this, JPL’s new requirement meant few women would qualify. Helen enjoyed being a mentor to the women in her group and wanted more for them, so she came up with a simple plan. She would find intelligent women and get them in the door by hiring them as programmers. Then she would encourage them to get advanced degrees in engineering. While they went to night school, she’d teach them to succeed within the framework of JPL. Between their aptitude and her guidance, a generation of female engineers would emerge in the lab.
On a warm, sunny summer afternoon, a dozen of the JPL women and their families met at the beach in Malibu for a picnic. The breeze coming off the ocean tangled their hair as they laid out blankets and beach chairs. From their bags and baskets they unpacked drinks, sandwiches, and fruit. The warm sun felt like heaven against their skin. They frolicked in bathing suits, some sporting stylish new bikinis, as they dipped their toes in the water before running screaming back to the warm sand. Between the heat of the sun and the penetrating cold of the water, they felt intensely alive.
It was a day to celebrate their accomplishments. While protesters were demanding equal rights for women across the country, the women at JPL had created their own equality. They had formed the lab in their own image, building an environment welcoming to women, where their work and contributions were every bit as valued as those of their male counterparts.
A transistor radio, containing the same technology that made their IBMs hum, played the Beatles while the women, with baby oil rubbed on their bodies, let the California sunshine soak into their hair and skin. They raised their drinks high and toasted one another, then their newest spacecraft. “Here’s to Mariner,” they cried. “Here’s to the Grand Tour.” Their ships were traveling millions of miles away, and even on Earth, within the confines of their little town of Pasadena, they were breaking new ground. Yet there was another frontier they had yet to conquer. The solar system was out there, waiting to be explored, if only they could persuade NASA to let them do it.
PART IV
1970s–Today
Barbara Paulson
Helen Ling
Susan Finley
Sylvia Miller
CHAPTER 11
Men Are from Mars
Barbara Paulson at Christmas was like a cyclone:
you either got swept in or you got out of her way. She didn’t care that there was no snow on the ground or that California was in the grip of a December heat wave. She was going to get everyone in the holiday spirit. She decorated, brought in cookies, and made sure everyone was ready for the gift exchange. No names were allowed on the presents; instead you wrote a poem that would subtly tell the group both whom the gift was for and from. The tradition prompted groans every year, but enough of the women, particularly Sue Finley and Barbara, loved it enough to keep it going.
As Barbara was whirling around the office, Dick Wallace, Sylvia Lundy’s boss, brought a huge roll of chicken wire into the room. “What are you doing?” asked Barbara. “You’ll see,” he replied. He started forming the thin, malleable wire into a giant cone that reached all the way to the ceiling. Dick was always bringing the women something, and not just peanuts for their launches. In the spring he would fill the room with camellia blossoms from his yard and in the winter help decorate for the holidays. “There you go, there’s your Christmas tree,” he said with a big grin. The women laughed, admiring it. They took bunches of green tissue paper and threaded them through the holes in the chicken wire. Then they draped the tree with colored lights. A few homey ornaments also made their way onto it, all fashioned from odds and ends they found around the lab. They giggled at its funny shape and unusual decorations. One of the engineers, Paul Muller, popped his head into the room, looked at the tree, and muttered, “Highly inflammable.” As soon as he was gone, the women roared with laughter. If they could annoy Muller, it was definitely worth it.
Rise of the Rocket Girls Page 20