After the Apollo 1 tragedy, NASA canceled the planned follow-up mission, Apollo 2, and the name Apollo 3 was given retroactively to a previous unmanned mission. The next three Apollo flights were unmanned test flights. Apollo 7 was the first Apollo flight with astronauts on board, and it was launched successfully on October 11, 1968. The three-man crew spent nearly eleven days in orbit and tested the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM), a large capsule that had been built with enough room to carry three astronauts to the moon. The ultimate plan was for the command module to function as a kind of mother ship, essentially parking in orbit with one astronaut at the controls, while the two other astronauts boarded a smaller spacecraft inside the mother ship that would separate and carry them to the moon. Once there, the two astronauts would exit the smaller spacecraft, called the Lunar Lander, and explore the moon’s surface. They then would get back onboard the Lunar Lander, blast off from the moon, reconnect with the mother ship, and all three astronauts would travel together back to Earth. Previous tests had proven the viability of this concept, which required a series of precisely timed steps. And each step had to be tested before the trip to the moon. Apollo 7’s mission was to test the command module, and it worked beautifully. For the first time, the astronauts also broadcast live from space, an important feature that would continue to connect a curious public to NASA’s space voyages.
Finally, a tumultuous 1968 closed with the December 21 launch of Apollo 8, which made the three astronauts on board the first crew to reach the moon. They made it there on Christmas Eve and spent the day in orbit. That evening, they broadcast live, showing stunning pictures of the moon and the Earth. One of the photos (called Earthrise), taken by astronaut William Anders as the Earth rose past the moon’s surface, would become iconic. When it was time to end the broadcast, they took turns reading the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis in the Holy Bible.
“For all the people on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you,” Anders said. “‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
Jim Lovell followed with four more verses. Frank Borman read the last two and added, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
The six-day mission ended successfully with a return to Earth on December 27 and this pronouncement from Lovell: “Roger, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”
During this time, Al Hamer and I were putting in long hours. We’d work our regular shift from eight to five, go home for dinner, and then return to the office at night to check with the engineers from the NASA installation that was monitoring the flight. No one asked us to do it. We had computed the orbits, and we just wanted to be on hand to see that things were going as they should. We did this so frequently that our supervisor finally put a stop to it. We couldn’t continue working sixteen hours a day at Langley without permission and without getting paid, he said. We weren’t asking for pay. To us, this was fun. But we adjusted our schedules to make sure we weren’t working far beyond our stipulated hours.
After two more missions to test the lunar module and its ability to rendezvous with the command module, it was time to walk on the moon. My part was done. I had given it my best, and I was excited about the planned launch on July 16, 1969. But two days before, the television news began showing that Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a confidant of and close adviser to the late Dr. King, had led hundreds of protesters to the front gates of the Kennedy Space Center for a candlelight vigil to protest the launch. Rev. Abernathy, who had succeeded Dr. King as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had taken on the leadership of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The campaign’s goal was to draw attention to the poverty and suffering in America’s cities, as NASA spent more than twenty billion dollars to send men to the moon. Rev. Abernathy and the protesters returned the next day for a march, led by two mules and a wooden wagon, illustrating the starkness of poverty versus the technological advancements about to unfold just beyond the space center’s gates. Rev. Abernathy had requested a meeting with NASA administrator Thomas Paine, who came out to greet the demonstrators. News photographers snapped pictures and took video as the protesters slowly approached, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Rev. Abernathy spoke, telling Mr. Paine and the cameras that a fifth of the people in this country didn’t have adequate food, clothes, housing, and medical care and that there was an “inexcusable gulf between America’s technological abilities and our social injustice.” He said the nation’s priorities were misplaced and urged that funds used for space exploration be spent to help those citizens suffering from the effects of poverty.
His points were powerful, and Mr. Paine seemed from the news coverage to handle the conundrum well. He showed empathy and humility, acknowledging “the tremendously difficult human problems.” He added that “if we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button.” He suggested that there might be a way for NASA to contribute to addressing the issues raised, and he asked Rev. Abernathy to pray for the astronauts’ safety. Paine even invited some of the demonstrators to watch the launch from the VIP section at the space center. The two men shook hands and parted ways.
The next morning, July 16, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin boarded the spacecraft for their journey to make history. At 9:32 a.m., the huge Saturn V rocket—as tall as a 36-story building and at 6.2 million pounds, the weight of about 400 elephants—lifted off, headed to the moon. Thousands of spectators lined the beaches and highways in Florida near the launch site. As I watched the launch with my Langley colleagues that Wednesday morning, I tingled with excitement, confident that my numbers were right. But I prayed silently that there would be no technical glitches. In this line of business, that possibility always hovered.
By the following Sunday, as the lunar lander, dubbed Eagle, made its way to the moon, I was attending a leadership conference for Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. My sorority had been a constant in my life since 1934, when I followed my friend Dit into the sisterhood. Our favorite high school math teacher, Angie King, who later also taught me math in college, most likely influenced many of the girls at our high school and college to become AKAs. She was supersmart, ladylike, and nurturing. She was the faculty sponsor of the student chapter of the sorority at West Virginia State and a charter member of the Alpha Omicron Omega graduate chapter in the Charleston-Institute area of West Virginia in 1929. I admired everything about her, and I figured if Alpha Kappa Alpha helped make ladies like her, I wanted to be one. So I couldn’t wait to get to college to join the sorority.
Later I would come to appreciate the sorority’s focus on service. Our motto, “Service to All Mankind,” speaks to that mission, and I have enjoyed being part of uplifting our community through scholarship programs, mentoring, voter registration, and so much more for more than eighty years. I especially love the camaraderie and the strong network of college-educated, highly motivated black women. When I first moved to Newport News, I walked into a ready-made community of sorority sisters who helped me adapt and feel at home, and that scenario is repeated every day around the world. I was more likely to see my NASA colleagues Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Eunice Smith at a sorority meeting or a sorority function than at work once I was moved out of the West Computers unit. When NASA dissolved the segregated unit, the remaining women were spread out over various divisions throughout the Langley complex. Since I didn’t eat in the cafeteria at work, I rarely had a chance to interact with them or anyone outside o
f my division at work.
My oldest daughter, Joylette, joined the sorority at Hampton Institute in 1960, and one of her “line sisters” (the young ladies who go through a “pledge” process and enter the sorority together) was future NASA superstar Christine Darden. The girls came to think of me as their “room mother,” and I even hosted a barbeque for them in the backyard of our home. Little did I know that Christine would come to work at Langley years later in 1967 as a data analyst during NASA’s increased recruiting efforts to hire more black employees. When she later showed up with her husband and two daughters at my church, Carver Presbyterian, I didn’t recognize her right away. As head of the choir, I walked over and introduced myself to her, welcomed her to the church, and invited her to join the choir. That’s when she reminded me of our connection during her college days. Christine became a faithful member of the choir, and we spent good time together outside of work through the choir and our sorority.
It felt completely natural that I would be surrounded by my sorority sisters on July 20, 1969, for what could become one of the most important moments of my career. And no matter how cool I may have looked on the outside, I could not yet relax. Things could go spectacularly well, which I fully expected, but I knew, too, there was a good chance of catastrophe. So between meetings I found a television to keep up with the crew’s progress. As the time for the landing drew near, I sat, surrounded by my sorority sisters, in front of the small black-and-white television for this historic moment. The presence of my sisters was comforting.
At 4:17 p.m. EDT, a voice cracked from the lunar module. It was Armstrong, reporting, “The Eagle has landed.” My sorority sisters celebrated with applause, but I knew better than everyone around me that this was just the first of many things that had to go right for the mission to be a total success.
Hours more would pass, and I was back in my room at the Hillside Inn when the astronauts finally emerged from the spacecraft. I was among the estimated six hundred million people worldwide watching via television at 10:56 p.m. as Armstrong stepped off the ladder and became the first man to walk on the moon.
All of us who were listening and watching then heard him make an iconic proclamation: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Armstrong later would reveal that he actually said “one small step for a man . . .” but that the word was inaudible.)
Aldrin followed him out onto the moon’s surface nineteen minutes later, and they planted an American flag. The flag seemed to wave perfectly (though we’d learn later that engineers had designed a special, retractable flagpole, since there is no breeze on the moon). Pride filled me—pride in my country, pride in the astronauts, pride in all the men and women I knew who had worked hard behind the scenes to give our nation this moment. We had met President Kennedy’s call to make it to the moon by the end of the decade.
As exuberant as we all were in that moment, we were not across the finish line yet. Our astronauts had to get back home safely, and that required yet even more precision and timing. This was not like missing your airline flight and getting stranded at the airport for, say, six hours, until you can catch the next plane. Our astronauts had just a small window of time to connect with that orbiting vehicle going around. We had done the error ellipsoid calculations, and we knew that if they missed it by a certain number of degrees or more than certain feet per second, they were done. There would be no way for them to get back.
Fortunately, everything else worked as planned. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two and a half hours performing various tasks, which included unveiling and leaving on the moon’s surface a plaque that read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” The stainless-steel plaque had the engraved signatures of President Richard Nixon and the three astronauts. They also took photographs, collected 48.5 pounds of lunar rock and soil samples, and deployed four experiments. Other items that the astronauts left behind on the moon included commemorative medallions bearing the names of the three deceased Apollo 1 astronauts and two cosmonauts (Russian space travelers) who also had died in accidents, as well as a tiny silicon disk containing microminiaturized goodwill messages from seventy-three countries and the names of congressional and NASA leaders. The astronauts then returned to the lunar module and closed the hatch for about seven hours of rest. In all, Armstrong and Aldrin spent about twenty-one hours and thirty-six minutes on the moon before blasting off and docking again with the command service module for their journey back to Earth. On Thursday, July 24, 1969, at 12:50 p.m. EDT, the command module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean about 920 miles southwest of Honolulu with all three astronauts safely inside.
Those bright, colorful parachutes were quite a beautiful sight.
We had done it. We had come from behind for the strongest possible finish. We not only beat the Soviets to the moon, but also all three of our men made it back to Earth alive. The Space Race was done, and our men had planted the victory flag. I was part of the team that helped them win. This was more than I ever could have imagined as that little girl who once loved counting the stars. And the long-ago fascination with the wild idea of becoming a research mathematician had led me higher than I even knew was possible. By the grace of God, though, I’d figured it out, just as Dr. Claytor had challenged. The magnitude of the moment washed over me.
And finally, I could take that deep sigh of relief.
Chapter 11
Land on a Firm Foundation
My career at NASA continued long after Apollo 11’s first thrilling mission to the moon. I would assist with five more Apollo flights that also made it to the moon and gave our astronauts a chance to expand our nation’s knowledge of the world beyond. I was happy to be part of it all.
By the mid- to late 1960s, though, the space program was competing for federal dollars with the Vietnam War, President Johnson’s War on Poverty, and other big-ticket programs. Once the Space Race was won, public interest in NASA’s moon voyages also seemed to wane. Apollo 17’s twelve-day mission in December 1972 brought that historic program to an end.
Before then, my buddy Al Hamer and I had hoped that NASA would build on its successes to the moon and focus next on exploring Mars. The two of us even wrote a research paper, doing some preliminary work for an Earth-to-Mars trajectory. The paper, titled “Simplified Interplanetary Guidance Procedures Using Onboard Optical Measurements,” was published in May 1972. A human mission to Mars had been included in a bold plan developed by the Space Task Group appointed by President Nixon in 1969 to chart a post-Apollo course for NASA. The task force also had envisioned a low-orbiting space station with a permanent crew and a space vehicle that would transport passengers and materials easily from Earth to support it. But the most ambitious parts of the plan would not prevail right away. President Nixon announced plans on January 5, 1972, to move forward with the more cost-effective space shuttle:
I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and ’90s. This system will center on a space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back. It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. In short, it will go a long way toward delivering the rich benefits of practical space utilization and the valuable spinoffs from space efforts into the daily lives of Americans and all people.
My work shifted to calculations for the space shuttle missions. Though it seemed our most exciting days may have been behind us, I still felt fortunate to have a job. The early 1970s were a time of significant reorganization, cost-cutting, and layoffs. As far as I know, my name never made it onto any of the reduction in force (RIF) or reduction in grade (RIG) lists. But the reorganization had an indirect impact on one of the colleagues I most hi
ghly respected: Dorothy Vaughan, the former head of the West Computers, who had transformed her career by becoming a computer programmer. She was on the list to be promoted, not laid off. But the job was not enough to keep her at Langley any longer. In 1971 she retired, ending a career that had set so many black women, including me, on a path to success.
My young friend Christine Darden made it through the first round of cuts in 1970, but two years later she learned that she was on the list for another planned round of layoffs. Seniority ruled, and Christine noticed she had been bumped onto the list by a black male employee who had been hired with her at Langley. But he had been assigned to an engineering group and promoted at least a couple of times, while her career had remained stagnant. Christine mustered the courage to go to her division chief with a pointed question: why were the male employees who came to Langley with the kind of credentials she had (a master’s degree in math) placed in engineering groups, while the women were assigned to the computer pools with no plans for advancement? The chief responded that none of the women had ever complained before. Christine not only saved her job, but also, two weeks later she got a new assignment that would change the trajectory of her career. She was placed in a group that was researching the sonic boom, an explosive sound produced when an aircraft moves faster than the speed of sound. Immediately her new supervisor gave her a big assignment that took three years of research and led to the 1975 publication of groundbreaking research that still is used in the industry. Christine returned to school while working full-time and raising her daughters, and ultimately earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering. With the help of a strong advocate in NASA’s Equal Employment Opportunity Office, Christine was promoted to the agency’s Senior Executive Service, the highest level for a federal employee. And she has become the preeminent international expert on the subject of sonic boom. I beam like a proud parent when I talk to schoolchildren about her intelligence, tenacity, and fearlessness. I especially love that Christine remains as humble and down-to-earth as when I first invited her to join our church choir.
My Remarkable Journey Page 19