Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  The computers had also changed. Only a decade before, the women had squabbled over scheduling time on massive IBMs, while Helen could still remember the Burroughs E101 that she programmed by inserting pins into holes on a pinboard. Now, amazingly, she and each member of her staff had their own personal computer. The revolution was made possible by microprocessors, tiny pieces of metal slimmer than the strands of hair on Helen’s head.

  The microprocessor revolutionized computing. People have debated its origins, but the engineers at Intel, specifically Marcian “Ted” Hoff, are usually credited as its inventors. Hoff was working on a desk calculator whose design called for eight separate chips, each programmed with an individual task. Hoff used the term “chip,” short for microchip, the tiny yet complex module that replaced the vacuum tube in computing. During the summer of 1958, Jack Kilby, a new employee at Texas Instruments, had come up with the idea for a chip by designing a slim slice of germanium etched with a transistor and all its components. He chose germanium because it is a semiconductor, able to conduct electricity under certain conditions. Later, manufacturers would swap out the superior germanium for silicon, which, because it’s composed primarily of sand, is both abundant and cheap.

  Despite the advances of computer chips, Hoff saw room for improvement. Instead of having each function of the computer on a separate chip, he wanted to create a multitasker capable of doing it all. Accordingly, he came up with the idea of a general-purpose chip that used erasable, programmable memory. With twenty-three hundred transistors etched into its silicon, the one-eighth-by-one-sixteenth-inch 4004 chip from Intel contained the same computing power as Cora, the massive IBM 1620 that the women considered one of their own and that was put out to pasture in the 1980s with scarcely a good-bye. The women would never form the same attachment to a computer as they had with Cora; the equipment didn’t stick around long enough. Technology was moving too fast for them to stop and make friends.

  The 4004 chip was the first microprocessor of many to come. Intel advertised the brand-new technology in 1971 as a “microprogrammable computer on a chip.” Yet at first they saw the future of the chips tied to their industrial clients; they could not imagine that they were destined to change the computing industry. Soon, though, they made their way into calculators, radios, toys, and, by the mid-1970s, personal computers.

  Microprocessors transformed computers from clunky and expensive machines to small and affordable devices. In 1974 Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems introduced the Altair, a build-it-yourself computer kit. With no keyboard and no screen, it didn’t do much besides blink lights. Data were fed in using toggle switches, and output came through the blinking pattern of red LEDs on the front of the machine. The company expected to sell only a few hundred of the kits, priced at $395, but instead, within three months, they were backlogged with four thousand orders.

  Given the popularity of their microcomputer, in 1975 they took a chance on hiring two childhood friends: Bill Gates, a twenty-year-old student at Harvard, and Paul G. Allen, a twenty-two-year-old employee at Honeywell. The two adapted the BASIC programming language for the Altair, making it far easier to use. The first program was delivered on a paper tape. Now connected to a Teletype terminal, Allen typed “PRINT 2 + 2” and immediately the answer popped out on the paper: 4. The new software was so popular that its users widely copied and distributed it among their friends. Because of this, Gates and Allen found their profits smaller than expected—they were barely breaking even. In response, Gates wrote an “open letter to hobbyists” in early 1976, sent to the Homebrew Computer Club and published in their newsletter, where he declared, “Most of you steal your software… Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid.” Despite their poverty, Gates and Allen still managed to form their own company, which eventually turned into the empire named Microsoft.

  A demonstration of the Altair energized two computer engineers who happened to be part of the Homebrew Computer Club: Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs. After Wozniak saw the Altair for the first time, he had a revelation. “The whole vision of a personal computer popped in my head,” he said. “That night I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”

  Personal computers, or PCs, soon underwent a revolution, with Apple, IBM, Xerox, Tandy, and Commodore all contributing models. By the 1980s the personal computer had invaded JPL, although it was first met with resistance. Managers initially believed the powerful central computers that made up the mainframe were sufficient for the lab’s needs and denied requests for individual computers.

  Soon, though, the ease and power of PCs became irresistible. Hewlett-Packard machines found a home on the desks of all technical staff. Coincidentally, with the new computers came a revised office layout. In 1984, the walls of private offices came down, making way for the dreaded cubicle. There was nearly an uprising over the new configuration. Many engineers were frustrated by the lack of privacy, the noise, and the secondhand cigarette smoke. As supervisor, Helen kept her private office, but Barbara was assigned to a new four-person cubicle. She found she didn’t mind the change. Two of the engineers she shared space with were new hires, straight out of college, and Barbara loved their enthusiasm.

  Barbara was impressed by the new PCs, each with a microprocessor that was able to hold an entire central processing unit on a sliver of silicon. They were a far cry from Cora, which ran at a speed of 1 million cycles per second, or 1 MHz. In contrast, the computers they worked with by the late 1980s ran at speeds of 25 million cycles per second. Both the lab’s first computer programs and the women who wrote them seemed like early pioneers. Now they were marching into a new age where computing speed and power were astounding.

  The lucky beneficiary of the impressive new technology was the study of Jupiter. While Voyager had flown by Jupiter, learning what it could while heading onward, Galileo was designed to stick around the planet to answer some of the JPL scientists’ pressing questions. How could one of Jupiter’s moons have active volcanoes while another lay buried under ice? By studying the formation of Jupiter and its diverse moons, they hoped to better understand the formation of the rest of the solar system.

  In October 1989, Galileo prepared to hitch a ride on the space shuttle Atlantis before continuing on to the massive planet. Though it wasn’t the first space shuttle to follow the Challenger disaster—the Discovery had been launched the previous fall—that tragedy still haunted the women’s thoughts. None of them watched as the space shuttle blasted off from Cape Canaveral. To everyone’s relief, the launch went off without a hitch, and Galileo sailed off into space flawlessly. The women celebrated their success. Creating the software architecture for the mission had been one of the most trying projects of Barbara’s career. Yet there were more challenges to come.

  Eighteen months later, disaster struck Galileo. An antenna the size of a moving truck atop the spacecraft wouldn’t open. The ship was orbiting Earth after spinning around Venus, gaining enough momentum before its slingshot to Jupiter. Though they tried to free the ribs that made up the antenna’s internal structure, the hinges wouldn’t budge. Engineers determined that the problem was likely caused by the spacecraft’s hiatus after Challenger. After the craft had spent five years in storage, no one had thought to check the lubrication and coating on the antenna’s rib apparatus. Without a functioning antenna they were in danger of losing the majority of the $1.5 billion probe’s data. The mission would be a complete failure.

  All they had left were the significantly less powerful low-gain antennas on the ship. The signal strength on the low-gain antenna was ten thousand times weaker than that of the high-gain ones. As Galileo pointed toward the antennas on Earth, it was like trying to hit a distant target with a squirt gun instead of a fire hose. Since they couldn’t improve on the antennas sitting on Galileo, JPL had to make the DSN more sensitive, better able to receive weak signals from far away. Sue wrote a program that created an array, electronically combining the power of the
DSN’s antennas. She carefully crafted the program to dovetail with the coding of the spacecraft, written six years earlier. It was the first time they had built such software, and everyone was amazed at the array’s ability to harness the power of the DSN in a novel way. They held their breath as they waited to receive data from the ship. Incredibly, the array worked. Sue’s program saved the mission, and Galileo continued on its way.

  The spacecraft made history as it flew through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which is punctuated by massive rocks. Already the array was paying off; those at JPL were shocked to find that one of the asteroids they were fortunate to pass en route, named Ida, boasted its own moon. Making it safely through the asteroids, the ship then watched as a comet, the Shoemaker-Levy 9, co-discovered by the same Eugene Shoemaker who worked on Ranger, broke up and dived into Jupiter’s atmosphere. In the stunning video and images, it looked as if the planet were being rocked by a series of bombs, the impacts glowing a fiery orange before leaving large, dark scars on the cloud tops.

  Finally reaching the massive planet in December 1995, Galileo relayed images of Jupiter and new data about its moons. Falling at 106,000 miles per hour, its atmospheric probe dropped into the planet’s atmosphere before deploying its parachute. For fifty-eight minutes the probe sent back weather data, revealing a hot, dry climate with winds of 450 miles per hour. Then it melted into the alien atmosphere. Peering onto the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, Sue saw firsthand evidence of the saltwater ocean hiding beneath giant ice rafts. Similar traces of salt water were found on the moons Ganymede and Callisto. Volcanoes erupted on Io while thunderstorms rocked Jupiter’s atmosphere. Sue watched proudly as the mission returned stunning pictures and scientific data. On September 21, 2003, after fourteen years in space and eight years exploring the planet, Galileo met its end by crashing into the gas giant at over 100,000 miles an hour.

  Not every mission could be saved. Sylvia comforted herself with this thought as she lay awake one night and thought of her beautiful project gone awry. She was the Mission Design manager for a Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby, or CRAF. She had spent years planning the exploration, which would study the geological structure of the asteroid Hamburga before flying in formation with the comet Kopff for three years, exploring the comet’s composition, atmosphere, and tail. She had even brought in her friends Sue and Barbara to help. Now it was over. It seemed that comets and asteroids weren’t sexy enough to get NASA funding. Lying in bed, she felt as if she had invested years of work for nothing.

  CRAF was the victim of funding woes. New budget rules outlined by the 1990 White House–congressional budget summit put caps on all defense, domestic, and international spending. With these new cuts, a House subcommittee had to decide between boosting housing and veterans’ programs or funding NASA’s space station. Amid controversy, the subcommittee opted for the former. When the House later reversed the decision, the subcommittee had to compromise by cutting housing funds and freezing NASA spending. The space station was saved, but all other NASA programs would suffer. Old wounds having to do with NASA’s priorities—scientific discovery versus human exploration—were reopened at JPL. Yet even with NASA’s “Better, Faster, Cheaper” policy, JPL would preserve the agency’s pursuit of science.

  Although her project was breaking up, with the crumbs spread out to other missions, Sylvia was finding her second chance at love. She had met Lanny Miller, another engineer at JPL, around the lunch table at the cafeteria. With his PhD in nuclear physics, he was a perfect match for Sylvia and her quick mind. They didn’t work on the same projects, but the two had much in common and soon married. Shortly after the wedding they contemplated starting a family—neither of them had children, and given the happiness Sylvia shared with her sisters growing up, she’d always assumed she’d have kids of her own one day. The timing, however, was off. They were getting older, and their careers were demanding. They decided to continue their married life with just the two of them.

  Despite NASA’s budgetary troubles, CRAF’s demise offered an opportunity. JPL could save a different mission: a return trip to Saturn. The spared project was named Saturn Orbiter Titan Probe, or SOTP, and would explore the rings of Saturn, peek at its atmosphere, and probe its moons to determine their composition. The mission would collaborate with the European Space Agency. Founded in 1975, the ESA, whose headquarters are in Paris, is composed of twenty-two member states. As the Soviet Union had begun to cooperate more with the ESA, the old flames of competition were stoked. The United States wouldn’t be second, not even in partnership. NASA would build the orbiter while the ESA would build the probe.

  The SOTP spacecraft looked familiar to the women. Its three-axis design was reminiscent of the successful Mariner and Voyager missions. But the scale of the ship was unparalleled. At nearly four times the size of Voyager, it was the largest interplanetary spacecraft yet constructed by NASA: 22 feet long with a 13-foot-high antenna. With wide eyes, the engineers watched the giant spacecraft come together in the JPL assembly facility. Soon, the mission received its official name: the orbiter was rechristened Cassini while the ESA probe was named Huygens.

  Sylvia worked on Cassini with her feelings still raw from the loss of her comet/asteroid mission. The engineers were plotting a roundabout route to the ringed planet, using gravity assist to carry the ship. It would encircle Venus twice before swinging around Earth and Jupiter, then being flung off to Saturn.

  It wasn’t the only collaboration NASA had with the ESA. After years of delays, budget setbacks, and then the Challenger disaster, the Hubble Telescope made its way into space, riding the back of the space shuttle Discovery, on April 24, 1990. A month later the telescope opened its eyes and took its first picture. While Hubble had better resolution than ground-based telescopes, that first image didn’t meet anyone’s expectations. Astronomers operating it from the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University immediately knew something was amiss. They soon discovered that the telescope had a flaw in its nearly eight-foot-wide primary mirror. To fix the problem, astronauts serviced Hubble, and soon afterward, the space telescope began sending back breathtaking images, some of which were familiar to the women. Those of the planets showed features recognizable from the old Mariner missions. As Helen and Barbara gazed at the thick sulfuric acid clouds of Venus photographed by Hubble, they were reminded of their first peeks at the planet with Mariner 2 in 1962, and the excitement they had felt witnessing the first flyby of another planet.

  Barbara was now working on a return to Venus in a mission named Magellan. JPL scientists wanted to understand why the planet, which should be the most like Earth, given its distance from the sun, was a barren wasteland. It had been ten years since the launch of the last planetary probes, the Voyagers. With the NASA budget limping along, Magellan was constructed mostly out of odds and ends lying around the lab from previous missions. Their goal was to map as much of the planet as possible. As part of the sequence design team, Barbara was writing software for the ship. She was working on the program that would send the spacecraft orbiting the planet, connected to the DSN as it flew.

  Barbara had a reputation for meticulous programming. She was trying to improve the efficiency of one of the Magellan programs when Bob Wilson, a supervisor, told her, “You don’t have to hone it anymore. The program works just fine.” Her years of experience had taught her to be fastidious. Helen was right beside her, working on software that connected the shuttle launch to the planetary launch. At the same time she was amazed at the new computer she had for the job. Helen couldn’t believe how slim and light her IBM PC Convertible laptop was. It weighed only thirteen pounds, so she could bring her work with her wherever she went.

  On April 28, 1989, the team gathered for the launch. As the shuttle counted down, they looked around at one another. There were no peanuts. Dick Wallace, the engineer who started the tradition during Ranger 7, had forgotten this time. They were scientists and tried not to be superstitious, but
the oversight put them all on edge. The peanuts had been handed out for nearly every launch since 1964. At T minus 31 seconds, the countdown stopped. An electrical issue had cropped up, and the launch was canceled. The room collectively took a deep breath. A week later, on May 4, the launch restarted. This time Wallace had made peanuts a top priority. Barbara and the other engineers, now fortified, watched the rocket blast off successfully. They were on their way back to Venus.

  Magellan arrived at Venus in August 1990. The mission was going just as planned, a sign of how well the group worked together. Now the ship was orbiting Venus, using radar imaging to map out as much of the surface as possible. Barbara hoped their programming would be a success and their view of Venus more detailed than ever before.

  On a mild day in April 1991, the lights were turned off but the sun still shone. Barbara smiled as Al Nakata, a mission manager, and the Magellan team sang “Happy Birthday.” A cake decorated with stars and aglow with candles sat before her. Barbara closed her eyes and let wishes float through her mind before settling on the right one. She blew out the candles and hoped it would come true. Despite the ever-increasing size of JPL, now the largest employer in Pasadena with more than five thousand employees, the lab clung to its close-knit community feeling.

  Barbara delighted in the Magellan team. They were dear to one another, their friendships glued together with the sugary icing of birthday cakes. It was a small thing, remembering birthdays, yet after decades of working on missions, she knew that it was the sign of a strong team and a great project manager.