Microlock is explained in David Christopher Arnold, Spying from Space: Constructing America’s Satellite Command and Control Systems (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), and in H. L. Richter Jr. et al., “Microlock: A Minimum-Weight Radio Instrumentation System for a Satellite,” JPL Publication No. 36, April 17, 1958.
Chapter 6: Ninety Days and Ninety Minutes
All personal anecdotes and family history obtained from author interviews.
Pickering’s experiences in Washington, D.C., when Sputnik launched are described in Douglas J. Mudgway, William H. Pickering: America’s Deep Space Pioneer (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2008).
The challenges of reentry are described in José Meseguer et al., Spacecraft Thermal Control (Oxford, England: Woodhead, 2012).
The clunky design of nose cones for reentry is explained in Andrew Chaikin, “How the Spaceship Got Its Shape,” Air & Space Smithsonian, November 2009.
Disappointment over the shutdown of Jupiter-C, or Juno, is described in Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
Burns incurred from nitric acid are described in L. Kolios et al., “The Nitric Burn Trauma of the Skin,” Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery 63(4) (2010).
A history of Sputnik can be found in Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2007), and Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Von Braun’s conversation, beginning with “Vanguard will never make it,” with Medaris and McElroy the evening that Sputnik’s launch was announced is reported in William E. Burroughs, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (New York: Random House, 1998).
President Eisenhower’s role in Jupiter-C and Explorer is explained in Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Project Red Socks is described in Paolo Ulivi and David M. Harland, Lunar Exploration: Human Pioneers and Robotic Surveyors (London: Springer, 2004); R. Cargill Hall, Lunar Impact: The NASA History of Project Ranger (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010); and Jay Gallentine, Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
Daily health reports were issued by the Soviet government claiming that the dog cosmonaut Laika was healthy and, later, that it was euthanized in space. In 2002, it was revealed that Laika died a few hours into the flight, due to overheating (temperatures inside Sputnik 2 were over 120 degrees Fahrenheit). More information can be found in Jennifer Latson, “The Sad Story of Laika, the First Dog Launched into Orbit,” Time, November 3, 2014.
Vanguard’s initial failure and subsequent success are described in Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970).
Kennedy warned, “The nation was losing the satellite-missile race with the Soviet Union because of… complacent miscalculations,” etc., as quoted in Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).
The launch of Explorer 1, including accounts of the Teletypes between Cape Canaveral and JPL and the subsequent press conference, is described in Matthew A. Bille and Erika Lishock, The First Space Race: Launching the World’s First Satellites (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).
Von Braun is quoted as saying “She is eight minutes late” in Erik Bergaust, Wernher von Braun: The Authoritative and Definitive Biographical Profile of the Father of Modern Space Flight (Washington, DC: National Space Institute, 1976).
Chapter 7: Moonglow
All personal anecdotes and family history obtained from author interviews.
The early days of NASA are documented in Thomas Keith Glennan, The Birth of NASA: The Diary of T. Keith Glennan (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2009).
Early plans made at JPL to explore the solar system soon after NASA’s formation, as well as the history of the Pioneer missions, are described in Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), and Mark Wolverton, The Depths of Space: The Story of the Pioneer Planetary Probes (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2004).
“Mars and Beyond” was an episode of Disneyland that aired on December 4, 1957.
The IBM 704 is described in Paul E. Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
Luna 1 was also known as Mechta and was the fourth launch of the series, although the first that was successful. It was named by the famous Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev and then renamed by the government. It is still circling the sun. More information on both the Luna and Pioneer missions can be found in Tom McGowen, Space Race: The Mission, the Men, the Moon (New York: Enslow, 2008).
The transfer of 157 employees from the navy’s Vanguard team and the phasing out of von Braun’s group at ABMA are described in Virginia P. Dawson and Mark D. Bowles, eds., Realizing the Dream of Flight (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2005), and Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
The history of what would become the Deep Space Network can be found in William A. Imbriale, Large Antennas of the Deep Space Network (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003).
Chapter 8: Analog Overlords
All personal anecdotes and family history obtained from author interviews.
The shutdown of Project Vega and subsequent plans made at JPL are described in Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), and Stephen J. Pyne, Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery (New York: Viking, 2010).
Project Mariner is described in Franklin O’Donnell, “The Venus Mission: How Mariner 2 Led the World to the Planets,” JPL/California Institute of Technology, 2012; Robert Van Buren, Mariner Mars 1964 Handbook, JPL, 1965; and Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program.
A history of Project Mercury can be found in M. Scott Carpenter et al., We Seven (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), and John Catchpole, Project Mercury: NASA’s First Manned Space Programme (London: Springer, 2001).
The letter quoted from von Braun to Pickering is also documented in Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2008.
Alan Shepard’s orbit is described in Colin Burgess, Freedom 7: The Historic Flight of Alan B. Shepard, Jr. (New York: Springer, 2014).
That the Vostok was designed to survive a week while the Mercury capsule could barely survive twenty-four hours is explained in Scott Carpenter and Kris Stoever, For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002).
The Atlas-Agena rocket is described in Lewis Research Center, ed., Flight Performance of Atlas-Agena Launch Vehicles in Support of the Lunar Orbiter Missions III, IV, and V (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1969).
The Ranger failures are detailed in David M. Harland, NASA’s Moon Program: Paving the Way for Apollo 11 (New York: Springer, 2009); Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program; and R. Cargill Hall, Project Ranger: A Chronology (Pasadena, CA: JPL/California Institute of Technology, 1971).
The thrilling 1960 World Series is chronicled in Michael Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).
In 1960, 25 percent of married mothers with children under the age of eighteen entered the workforce, as reported in Sharon R. Cohany and Emy Sok, “Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants,” Monthly Labor Review, February
2007.
Birth control became available in 1960 in the United States, as described in James Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
A history of FORTRAN, along with descriptions of how early keypunch computers worked and the IBM 1620, can be found in Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
Grace Murray Hopper’s story is told in her biography, Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013).
Lois Haibt is quoted as saying, “Nobody knew anything,” etc., when asked about compilers, in Lois Haibt, an oral-history interview conducted August 2, 2001, by Janet Abbate, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers History Center, Hoboken, NJ, U.S.A. (http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Lois_Haibt).
The IBM 1620’s nickname of CADET was facetiously said to stand for “Can’t Add, Doesn’t Even Try” because it had no digital circuit that performed addition functions, which meant that operators had to look up their answers in tables instead, as described in Richard Vernon Andree, Computer Programming and Related Mathematics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 1966).
A missing bar in the program was partly responsible for the Mariner accident, as reported in Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Arthur C. Clarke mistakenly said that Mariner 1 was “wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history” in The Promise of Space (New York: Berkley, 1955), and similar reports have been made elsewhere. Ceruzzi explains how the Mariner 1 failure was a “combination of a hardware failure and software bug.”
Material about the Mercury 7 and the Saturn rocket can be found in Richard W. Orloff and David M. Harland, Apollo: The Definitive Sourcebook (New York: Springer, 2006).
The Cuban missile crisis is described in Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). Both this book and the Kennedy Presidential Library website (http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Cuban-Missile-Crisis.aspx) describe the presence of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. However, the role that the missiles played in the crisis wasn’t revealed to the American public until 1987.
Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, is credited with the saying “There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” Bill Pickering told the newspaper reporters, “Listen to the music of the spheres.” His words were repeated in many newspaper columns, including Philip Dodd, “Rendezvous with Venus a Success!,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 15, 1962.
Mariner’s float in the 1963 Rose Parade is described in David S. Portree, “Centaurs, Soviets, and Seltzer Seas: Mariner 2’s Venusian Adventure (1962),” Wired, December 20, 2014.
Chapter 9: Planetary Pull
All personal anecdotes and family history obtained from author interviews.
Abe Silverstein said, “I was naming the spacecraft like I’d name my baby” when speaking of Apollo, as quoted in Charles A. Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo: The Race to the Moon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
The Mariner Mars mission is described in Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978—The NASA History (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009); Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Mariner-Mars 1964: Final Project Report, JPL, 1968; and Dennis A. Tito, “Trajectory Design for the Mariner-Mars 1964 Mission,” Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 4(3) (1967): 289–296.
Venus possibly has no magnetic field because the core is either completely solid or completely liquid. On Earth, the phase boundary in the interior also releases heat, driving convection as the inner core expands in size, approximately 1 millimeter a year. However, it’s unknown whether this effect can drive a geodynamo by itself. Models of Venus’s core predict that it is at least partially liquid, given its size and heat budget, although the actual state is unknown. Slow rotation of a planet has other interesting effects, such as uneven solar heating and unusual atmospheric dynamics. A discussion of the magnetic field on Venus can be found in Frederic W. Taylor, The Scientific Exploration of Venus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
More information on the Coriolis effect can be found in Graham P. Collins, “Coriolis Effect,” Scientific American, September 1, 2009.
The problems with heat sterilization affecting the operation of the spacecraft are described in R. Cargill Hall, Lunar Impact: The NASA History of Project Ranger (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010). The Mariner Mars missions were not heat-sterilized, as specified in Mariner-Mars 1964, JPL.
The live feed of Ranger 6 that got switched to “Spray on Avon cologne mist and walk in fragrant beauty,” James Webb’s saying “One more flight. You’ve got only one more flight,” and Pickering’s quote at the Miss Guided Missile contest—“We’re going to fix this. We’re going to make it work”—are detailed in Jeffrey Kluger, Moon Hunters: NASA’s Remarkable Expeditions to the Ends of the Solar Systems (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
A 43 percent drop in the number of switchboard operators between 1947 and 1960 was reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1963.
Computer jobs being cut at NASA centers is reported in Sheryll Goecke Powers, “Women in Flight Research at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center from 1946 to 1995,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration History Office, 1997.
The history of peanuts at JPL is explained in Associated Press, “Peanuts: Rocket Scientists’ Lucky Charm,” Lodi (California) News-Sentinel, December 3, 1999.
The debate over lunar landing sites is reported in Hall, Lunar Impact, and Paolo Ulivi and David M. Harland, Lunar Exploration: Human Pioneers and Robotic Surveyors (London: Springer, 2004).
Eugene Shoemaker’s push to take images at the moon’s terminator for Ranger 8 is described in David H. Levy, Shoemaker by Levy: The Man Who Made an Impact (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Problems with the shroud covering Mariner 3 and the eventual solution are described in John S. Lewis and Ruth A. Lewis, Space Resources: Breaking the Bonds of Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Percival Lowell published three books about Mars. He describes the canals extensively in Mars and Its Canals (New York: Macmillan, 1906).
Fred Billingsley, one of the engineers the computers worked with, first published the word pixel, short for “picture element,” in 1965. The early days of digital-image processing and JPL’s pioneering role are described in James Tomayko, Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1988).
“Mars is probably a dead planet” is from the editorial “The Dead Planet,” New York Times, July 30, 1965.
Twenty percent of married women with children under the age of six participated in the labor force, as reported in Committee on Finance, Child Care Data and Materials, U.S. Senate, 1974.
The Mariner findings, including the poles and gravitational field, are described in Ezell and Ezell, On Mars.
The Surveyor program is explained in Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program.
Pickering recounts hearing “Oh, by the way, we’re live all over the world” from a member of the media, in an oral-history interview with Mary Terrall, November 7–December 19, 1978, Caltech Archives.
The Apollo 1 disaster, including the quote “Fire! We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!,” is chronicled in David J. Shayler, Disasters and Accidents in Manned Spaceflight (London: Springer, 2000).
The history of pantyhose is recounted in Joseph Caputo, “50 Years of Pantyhose,” Smithsonian, July 7, 2009.
The Apollo 6 mission is described in Richard W. Orloff and David M. Harland, Apollo: The Definitive Sourcebook (New York: Springer, 2006).
Chapter 10: The Last Queen of Outer Space
All personal anecdotes and family history obtained from author interviews.
FORTRAN 66 is described in Dennis C. Smolarski, The Essentials of FORTRAN (Piscataway, NJ: Research and Education Association, 1994).
The story of Apollo 11 is recounted in Charles A. Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo: The Race to the Moon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
The Mariner missions and their findings are described in Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978—The NASA History (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009). Mariner 5 was originally a backup for 4 but was modified to go to Venus instead.
The telemetry system that Margie worked on is described in R. C. Tausworthe et al., “A High-Rate Telemetry System for the Mariner Mars 1969 Mission,” JPL Technical Report 32–1354, 1969.
The dust storm that was mistaken for vegetation and a Martian spring is explained in William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara, Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001).
The effect of Mars on literature is described in Robert Crossley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011).
Invaders from Mars premiered in 1953, and The Day Mars Invaded Earth came out in 1963.
The Grand Tour, as well as the origins of what would become known as Voyager and its trajectory, is described in Stephen J. Pyne, Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery (New York: Viking, 2010), and Ben Evans with David M. Harland, NASA’s Voyager Missions: Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond (London: Springer-Verlag, 2004).
The cancellation of the Grand Tour is discussed in Edward C. Stone, “Voyager, the Space Triumph That Almost Wasn’t,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2014.
A description of the Women’s Strike for Equality and the quote “I don’t know what these women are thinking of,” etc., are found in Catherine Gourley, Ms. and the Material Girls: Perceptions of Women from the 1970s Through the 1990s (Minneapolis: Lerner, 2007).
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