Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  Over the years Barbara had spent many of her birthday wishes trying to sway the fates in favor of her missions. They hadn’t all worked out. The next project, the Mars Observer, would be one of the most painful. The mission started out with every chance of success—with one exception: they forgot to pass out the peanuts. The ship blasted off from Cape Canaveral in September 1992. Even as Barbara watched, she knew her days of watching launches were coming to a close. She was getting older and beginning to think about retirement. It had been seventeen years since she worked on Viking, the previous mission to Mars, and everyone was anxious to return. Helen and Barbara had worked side by side, developing the graphic display software for the mission. There was so much they still wanted to understand about the planet, and Observer would give them a glimpse of its climate, geology, and gravitational field.

  Yet Barbara wouldn’t be there to see the results. After putting in the hard work of programming, she was leaving the project in capable hands. In April 1993 she retired, forty-five years after she started at JPL. Packing up her office was like opening up a time capsule. Mementos from all of JPL’s missions lined the walls. She boxed up pictures from Voyager, a landscape of Venus taken by Magellan, and numerous achievement awards, then headed to her farewell luncheon, where all her friends were gathering. She took a last look and swallowed, holding the tears back. This isn’t a real good-bye, she told herself. I’ll be back. She knew that even in retirement she wouldn’t be able to stay away, especially from Helen, Sue, and Sylvia.

  Four months later, Barbara got the news. The Mars Observer had disappeared. Two days before it was supposed to enter the Red Planet’s orbit, it simply dropped off the map. While the engineers debated theories—the most popular being that the fuel line had ruptured, causing the ship to spin and enter “contingency mode,” a state of reduced communications—there would never be an answer. The ship was simply gone. The mission was a complete failure. While newspaper headlines lambasted NASA for wasting $813 million on a vanishing hunk of metal, Barbara wept over the hours of work they had put in.

  A year later it was Helen’s turn to retire. She was ready to go; there were no regrets. The room swelled as engineers from decades of JPL’s history, even some from the 1950s, came to share their memories in tribute. Everyone loved Helen. She smiled at the crowd of familiar faces and warmly embraced Dennis Tito, a former engineer at JPL turned billionaire space tourist, who had come to celebrate his favorite human computer. In the heat of the late afternoon they talked about old times, no trace of tears on their cheeks, since they knew that the friendships they formed would long outlive their careers in the lab.

  Sylvia, younger than her friends, attended Barbara’s and Helen’s retirement parties with a heavy heart. She would miss them. Yet her work at JPL was shifting. Sylvia had been applying for new positions within the lab and was now excited to step into her dream job: project manager in the Mars exploration program.

  She was gleeful about the planned expansion of the program. She wouldn’t take her position until after the Mars Surveyor mission of 1998, but the intervening years were going to be busy. As part of the program, JPL would first set up a communications network on the planet and then send rovers down to the surface. Sylvia watched the rovers being built in the lab and going through their rigorous training program. In a rocky, dusty playground built at JPL to simulate the Martian surface, the little robots learned to stand up from their squatting position, straightening themselves out to about a foot tall. Instead of using rockets to land safely on the surface, the team was designing an innovative system using parachutes and airbags to achieve a soft landing. Everyone cheered when the rover survived a bounce as high as a ten-story building.

  JPL launched the Mars Pathfinder, armed with airbags, in December 1996. The mood was tense; after all, it had been two decades since a successful Mars mission. The loss of the Mars Observer had extended the long lull in Martian exploration. Russia had similarly struggled in getting to the Red Planet. Phobos, their program to Mars and its moons, had failed in 1988. Mars missions have a history of disappointment; to date, approximately two-thirds of them have ended in failure.

  By July 1997, NASA’s ship arrived at the planet. Sylvia held her breath as the parachute deployed and the Mars lander and rover softly sank to the surface. Only eight seconds before landing, the airbags puffed out, the whole apparatus measuring 17 feet wide. They enfolded the equipment as it hit the surface of the distant planet and bounced 40 feet in the air. After fifteen more bounces, the lander rolled to a stop, its airbags retracted, and its solar panels fanned out like the petals of a flower. In celebration, Sylvia proudly had her picture taken with a duplicate of the rover’s giant airbags.

  The lander, named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, started relaying information and images back to Earth while the rover started to roam. The first of its kind on Mars, the rover was named Sojourner, after the abolitionist Sojourner Truth. At only twenty-five pounds, the robot started to cruise the Martian landscape, analyzing rocks with an X-ray spectrometer. It found that the rocks had higher levels of silica than expected. Martian meteorites, the only samples from Mars we have so far, are basalts, a type of volcanic rock relatively low in silicon and high in iron and magnesium. Because basalts are so common on Earth, the moon, and among Martian meteorites, geologists expected Pathfinder to find them as well. Instead, the high silica content indicated that a different type of volcanism might have taken place on Mars’s surface, a type that typically occurs in the presence of water on Earth. Such findings only whetted appetites back home for more data.

  Sojourner lasted eighty-five sols, short for “solar days” on Mars, which are slightly longer than Earth’s at twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes. It was far longer than the seven sols planned for the mission. Eventually, Sojourner lost communication with Earth, likely due to depleted batteries.

  Luckily the JPL team knew they were going back. In December 1998 and January 1999, the Surveyor mission launched. It was composed of two spacecraft: the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. The Climate Orbiter would measure the weather and double as a communications satellite for the next generation of rovers sent down to the surface. The Polar Lander would launch the next month, landing on the planet’s south pole and studying its composition. The south pole, with its white cap, was seen as a promising place to find water on the planet.

  The engineers watched the trajectory of the Orbiter closely, correcting the spacecraft’s path through space. That’s where the trouble started. The numbers taken from the ground didn’t match that of the ship. They soon found out why. The ship’s software used the metric system, whereas the ground computers were programmed to use the far less common imperial pound seconds. Although NASA had been using the metric system exclusively since 1990, the ground computers sending navigation commands for the orbiter’s thrusters were coming from a private contractor, Lockheed Martin. The company sent their commands in the unusual English unit of measurement while the ship, programmed by JPL, used newton seconds. The result was that they were underestimating the impact of the thrusters on the ship by a factor of 4.45. With their measurements off for an embarrassing reason, the engineers had to keep making little corrections to the ship’s path, far more than they had planned. Once it reached Mars, the spacecraft would start its engine to make one big push into orbit before putting on the brakes and gradually losing speed. At least that was the plan. Sylvia watched nervously as the ship fired up its engine. It was coming in too fast and too low. Then, just like the Observer before it, it disappeared. It had likely dipped down into the atmosphere before leaving Mars to circle the sun.

  The Polar Lander suffered a similar fate. Its signal vanished after the ship arrived at the Red Planet. As the days passed, Sylvia began to give up all hope that the lander would be located. Its demise was likely due to a software bug that caused the engines to shut down prematurely. Sylvia’s shock turned into sorrow. The mission was a complete failure. Worse yet, th
e mishap made the future of Mars missions shaky. With so many unknowns, NASA canceled the Mars Lander scheduled for 2001. It made Sylvia nervous to be taking her position as manager in the wake of the catastrophe, especially since JPL had previously planned to increase the number of Mars missions. About every two years, the planets lined up and the door to Mars opened. If they wanted to seize each opportunity, they had to decide how to explore Mars, by probe or by rover, and how to reconcile their scientific goals with limited budgets.

  Investigating the mishaps that had been their downfall, Sylvia and her team pushed on. They needed more testing and more teamwork for their missions, and she wanted to help create that culture in the lab. They planned a future for the Mars missions, focusing on a new generation of Mars exploration rovers. During one of these meetings Donna Shirley, the manager of the Mars Exploration Program and one of Sylvia’s supervisors, looked around the room. All of the engineers at the table were women. It was the first time Donna could remember such a thing happening. The times they are a-changin’, she thought. The engineers were considering using nimble robots that would one day drill into the Martian surface, collect samples, and send them back to Earth. They would probe the geologic history and hopefully unearth evidence of life on the planet.

  Under Sylvia’s guidance, the Mars program office reeled off a string of successes. In 2004, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers bounced down on the planet, again protected by airbags. The airbags got in the way for Spirit after it landed. The poor rover couldn’t break free of the meddlesome things, and the engineers at JPL had to spin it around before driving off a side ramp. Finally freed, Spirit dug into the soil and took the first microscopic image from the surface of another planet.

  Opportunity, on the other hand, had fantastic luck right out of the gate. The rover stumbled onto evidence, nestled in the rocks, that salty water deep enough to splash in had once covered them. Using a microscope at the end of its arm, the rover returned an image of tiny round spheres that JPL called blueberries. The berries were filled with the mineral hematite in a crystal pattern that on Earth forms only in water. Watching the rovers roam, Sylvia felt as if she were watching a piece of herself crossing the Martian dirt. Both rovers sent back stunning panoramic images of Mars. The design goal for the rovers was one year of operation, far more than Sojourner’s three-month voyage. The rovers far surpassed Sylvia’s goal. Spirit wandered the planet for five years before losing a wheel in the soft soil; Opportunity continues to roam Mars, a decade after it started. And a newcomer has joined the rovers: Curiosity, which landed in 2012.

  While robots roamed Mars, a new group of women were taking over at JPL. The cohort hired and trained by Helen, Barbara, and Sue had spread out around the campus and, in turn, hired women of their own. The proportion of female engineers at the lab increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 15 percent in 1994. Today more women are employed at JPL, in all positions, than at any other NASA center. It’s an achievement made possible by Macie and Helen and their tireless campaigns to hire women over the course of fifty years. The expansion of women’s roles at JPL stands in sharp contrast to trends in the rest of the country. In 1984, 37 percent of computer-science graduates were women; today that number is at 18 percent.

  You can write a lot of programs in five decades. The code that Sylvia, Helen, Margie, Sue, Barbara, and their colleagues wrote would continue to work its way into spacecraft, navigation systems, climate studies, and Mars rovers. It would get spliced up and repurposed, pasted into different missions, sent out into space, driven on far-off planets, and even brought back to Earth, taking on a life of its own long after the women departed. The code would even inform our missions today, from the Mars Curiosity rover that has been exploring Mars since 2012, to the Cassini orbiter that has been swinging around Saturn since 2004, to future Earth-orbiting instruments designed to study our own world.

  When Helen left, she was the last of her kind. The group of women once known as computers were no more. In their place a new generation of women with even more power and responsibility had taken their places. The sunny room in Building 122 where Barbara and Helen forged their careers as part of a committed all-female team was now dark, the old wooden desks long replaced by particleboard and plastic furniture.

  Sylvia, who bridged the gap as the last of the computers and the first of the new generation, left the lab in 2008, after forty years. Fiercely loved by her nephews and nieces, she never had children of her own. Sylvia was able to see part of her beloved canceled comet mission resurrected in a project called Rosetta. The mission is part of her heritage at JPL, an attempt to catch a comet as it falls through the sky. Launched in 2004 by the ESA in collaboration with JPL, the ship’s Philae lander touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014. As it sends back data, thanks to the DSN, it’s documenting the comet’s rising activity as it nears the sun.

  Sue remains at JPL. She’s worked at the lab for fifty-eight years and won’t retire until she sees her latest mission, Juno, succeed in orbiting Jupiter, which should happen in July 2016.

  Soft light sparkled onto the archways and tall columns of the opulent Caltech Athenaeum. It was an occasion like none other at JPL: the fiftieth anniversary of Explorer 1. On a January night in 2008, the institute celebrated the fateful day the first American satellite left Earth’s atmosphere. Sadly, when making up the guest list for the anniversary, JPL forgot some important names. Five decades earlier, Barbara and Margie had sat in the control room and tracked the satellite as it flew through the sky, but in 2008, they were in their homes in Pasadena, just a few miles away from the celebration. They are two of the last people who remember JPL’s control room that night, and their work formed our first steps into space.

  Their legacy stretches into the unknown. The Voyagers are reaching far into deep, dark space. On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 looked over its shoulder to take some final pictures, now known as the Family Portrait. Taken at the suggestion of Carl Sagan, it is a series of photos that show our sun and six planets of our solar system. Pale Blue Dot, one of these photos (a composite of three images), became famous because, when viewed at a distance of four billion miles, Earth is less than a pixel in size, a small speck of blue surrounded by the vastness of the universe. Yet within that tiny dot, swirling in a ray of sunlight, lies all known life. With one last look at its home, the little probe left the solar system and entered interstellar space. It is traveling farther than any man-made object ever has. But it wasn’t just made by men.

  Enclosed in aluminum, a treasure lies within Voyager’s memory banks. Written on only forty kilobytes of memory, thousands of times less than what an iPhone holds, are programs first handwritten with pencil and paper by an extraordinary group of women. The programs represent only a slice of their work but were constructed at the pinnacle of their careers. Those programs are remnants soaring amid the space dust. They are the legacy of women written in the stars.

  Epilogue

  I pass through the security gate and into the visitors’ parking lot. There are deer nibbling away at the grass, not at all frightened of the humans walking nearby. It’s just how Barbara described it. Yet the rest of the lab is different than I imagined, smaller somehow. The buildings are nestled close together and the courtyard is full of young people enjoying the California sunshine. It doesn’t feel like a government installation, but more like a college campus.

  However, appearances are deceiving; once I enter the buildings, the complexity of the science performed within becomes apparent. Along with a group of seventeen women, I watch as rovers play tag in a rocky playground and spacecraft are assembled in a huge, clean hangar that, according to my companions, hasn’t changed much over the decades. I’m traveling with a group of women who are not strangers to the lab. They are the computers, the first women of JPL. My companions are Barbara Paulson, Joanie Jordan, Kathryn Thuleen, Georgia Dvornychenko, Virginia Anderson, Janet Davis, Helen Ling (accompanied by her daughter, Eve), Sylvia Miller, Victori
a Wang, Margie Brunn, Caroline Norman, Lydia Shen, Linda Lee, Marie Crowley, Nancy Key, and Sue Finley. We have gathered for a reunion, and some of the women have traveled across the country to be here.

  From the moment I met them, it was obvious they are not just former co-workers, but also close friends. They groan as they point out Building 11, remembering how uncomfortable the concrete-walled computer room was with no heat or air-conditioning. Then they look over at the outdated test pits, no longer in use, and reminisce about those ear-shattering small-motor tests. I watch Barbara and Helen. They have spoken tens of thousands of times, in settings both formal and casual, yet today seems special. It’s been years since they last saw each other.

  Helen resides in an assisted-living facility nearby, and her children, especially Eve, take care of her. Her husband, Arthur, retired five years before she did and started taking care of their grandchildren. Patrick, their son, learned programming from Helen, who taught him BASIC and FORTRAN and inspired him to study computer science. Eve excelled in swimming, making it all the way to a qualifying round in tryouts for the U.S. Olympic swim team. Since Arthur passed away, Helen relies on Eve, who takes tender care of her and loves to bake for her.

  In 2003, Barbara’s husband, Harry, was suffering from cancer. He was in hospice when Barbara swayed with sudden vertigo and flailed wildly around, unable to get her bearings. She’d never experienced anything like it before or since. She was finally able to right herself, but the doctors worried that she might have had a stroke. Their daughters, Karen and Kathy, were living in Iowa when they received the news, and they rushed back home to take care of her. As it turned out, Barbara was fine, but Harry was in decline. The girls spent one last week with their dad before he passed away. The father who snuggled them in blankets, changed their diapers, and loved them dearly was gone. Barbara’s unexplained case of vertigo was an undeniable gift to the girls, giving them that last week. After Harry passed, Barbara moved out to Iowa to be closer to Kathy and Karen. She’s never stopped being busy with her church, friends, and family. She recently became a great-grandmother.