Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  Muller was a complainer. He whined that the women monopolized Cora, the IBM 1620. Cora’s time had become valuable now that computer programs were finally taking precedence over hand-plotting. Unfortunately for Muller, the women had priority on Cora since they were responsible for 90 percent of the lab’s computer programming. The men were just beginning to dip their toes into the technology, and they lagged behind their female colleagues.

  While those at JPL immersed themselves in emerging technology, Apollo missions were beginning to feel routine. On April 10, 1970, the news that the Beatles were breaking up far overshadowed the Apollo mission scheduled to take place the next day. Despite the lack of attention, Apollo 13 lifted off Earth smoothly and was on its way to the moon. But only two days later, an oxygen tank aboard the ship exploded two hundred thousand miles from Earth. Soon after astronaut Jim Lovell said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” the world became riveted.

  At mission control in Houston, NASA flight controllers acted heroically, abandoning the original mission of landing on the moon and transforming the lunar module into a lifeboat. Even at JPL, where manned missions weren’t part of the repertoire, the crisis brought things to a standstill. The women waited anxiously for news that the three astronauts had safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. When on April 17, they made it, with bright orange-and-white-striped parachutes slowing the module’s plunge into the water, the lab in Pasadena burst into cheers and hugs. With the safe return of the astronauts, the “successful failure” brought attention back to NASA, though not necessarily the attention the space agency was looking for. The accident changed how manned space exploration was perceived, earning Apollo a dangerous reputation.

  Barbara contemplated the bravery of the astronauts as she made her way to Building 180, the tallest at JPL. At the top, on the ninth floor, was director Bill Pickering’s office, while Barbara and her colleagues had their offices on the third floor. Despite their groundbreaking promotions, there remained a gulf between the men and women—not only an economic divide, since the men did earn more, but also a physical one. Most of the male engineers they worked with were in Building 230. Although they saw each other daily, working on problems and eating lunch together, the groups sent data between the two buildings using messengers. The women were starting to have fun with the mail. Like children sending notes across the classroom, the men and women started up a harmless flirtation in the missives flying back and forth.

  Most of the girls were being silly; they had no intention of actually dating their colleagues. Margie’s flirtation, however, was becoming serious. While some of the women shook their heads at her dating another engineer, Derry Lee Brunn captivated her. She couldn’t forget her abysmal first marriage to a onetime JPL engineer, yet here she was, ready to try again.

  Margie wasn’t thinking only about men; her mind was also on Mars. In the first days of February 1974, Mariner 10 passed Venus, circling around it just as anticipated. As the ship flew near the planet, it began sending back close-up images. Margie was afraid they would lose the spacecraft’s signal and not be able to pick it up again. However, as she had hoped, Mariner swung away from cloudy Venus and flew by Mercury a month later. Their first views of the tiny planet revealed a cratered, dead surface. There was no atmosphere, in the traditional sense, at all. Instruments on board the ship confirmed the planet had a dense, iron-rich core but surprisingly also detected a magnetic field. Scientists had thought the planet too small to generate one. As if assembling a giant puzzle, they put eighteen of the ship’s images together to form a clear picture of the surface. In crisp black and white they could see craters atop craters; Mercury looked battered and bruised. Without an adequate atmosphere, the planet has no protection from the impact of large debris such as meteorites. To Margie, though, it was beautiful. She had never felt more proud of a mission, even as the ship ran out of fuel and its transmitter was turned off, dooming it to incessantly orbit the sun.

  Mariner 10 proved to JPL that they could use the gravity of one planet as a slingshot to send a spacecraft to another. It was an important milestone as they geared up for the Grand Tour. Although it had been canceled just the year before, Sylvia and her colleagues resurrected the program, albeit with one-quarter the original budget. It was now called Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn 77, or MJS 77. Their dreams for the mission, however, were still grand. Although the official goal of the project was an encounter with Saturn, the team wasn’t content with the shortened journey. They were determined to explore the solar system and planned for the spacecraft to keep traveling as long as possible. To make this happen, they needed Sylvia to work on her post-E computer program, which would direct the ship after its encounter with Saturn, swinging it out to Uranus and Neptune. Writing the program was so much fun that Sylvia could hardly call it work. She came into the lab each morning excited to get started.

  The trajectory they came up with was a waltz around the planets. The spacecraft would swing around its biggest partner, Jupiter, passing between its moons before being swept up by the next partner, Saturn. From there it would spin around Uranus before being flung off to Neptune. Sadly little Pluto, like a wallflower never asked to dance, was too far away to be included. Sylvia’s programming made sure the ship swung in line with the movement of the planets it passed, so that instead of using fuel, it would simply be thrown from one planet’s gravitational field to the next. Each step of the elegant dance was carefully choreographed.

  While the program plotted a course, a successful flight still relied on humans. Flight technicians at JPL’s mission control needed to send signals to the ship at specific waypoints using the Deep Space Network. These midcourse corrections necessitated some fuel being carried on board to fire the thrusters while batteries powered by plutonium-238 would generate electricity. Besides this, gravity assist would do all the heavy lifting. The team published their audacious route in 1972, clearly defining the mission. The publication overwhelmed Sylvia; she could hardly believe it. Titled “Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977: The Mission Frame,” it both opened and closed with quotes from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, a nod to the mission’s grand aspirations. But for Sylvia the real excitement lay in seeing her own name included in the list of authors. It was her first publication, and she looked with pride at the trajectories within, the result of the group’s hard work and dedication to the Grand Tour. Along with her name was a picture of the team. Sylvia, resplendent in white, sat smiling among her co-authors: four male engineers.

  As Sylvia plotted a path through the universe, Helen was looking a little closer to home. She held in her hands a picture of Earth taken from space. The famous photograph, The Blue Marble, was taken during Apollo 17, the last manned lunar mission, in 1972.

  Despite Apollo’s accomplishments, public support for it had never been particularly strong. During the 1960s, most Americans didn’t believe the manned lunar program was worth the cost, with the exception of one poll taken immediately after Apollo 11. In 1965, only 39 percent of Americans thought that the United States should do whatever necessary, regardless of cost, to be the first nation on the moon. Now, with victory behind them, support waned further. The Apollo program was seen as expensive and unnecessary, especially with the country plunging deep into debt from the ongoing Vietnam War. In 1970 the budget for NASA was cut 17 percent, an odd reward for the program that had just won the space race. The next year, just after the Apollo 14 launch, two hundred African-American protesters held a March Against Moon Rocks at Cape Kennedy. One of the leaders, Hosea Williams, was quoted in the Rome (Georgia) News-Tribune as saying, “We are protesting our country’s inability to choose humane priorities.” Many, especially in the wake of the Apollo 13 disaster, shared his feelings.

  At NASA, it was generally expected that the program would run to Apollo 20, but that hope soon faded. After the success of Apollo 15, the first to include a three-day stay on the surface and a lunar rover, President Nixon considered canceling the program altogether. He wor
ried that another disaster like Apollo 13 could be detrimental to his 1972 reelection campaign. Finally, he was persuaded to allow Missions 16 and 17 to go ahead. But it was clear there would be no more. All told, six missions had carried twelve men to the lunar surface. But even with its many successes, only 41 percent of Americans in 1979 felt the Apollo program had been worth the cost. It was time to move on.

  With the end of Apollo, the Nixon administration began reconsidering NASA’s future. Shooting expensive rockets into the sky, never to return, was untenable. In this atmosphere, the Space Task Group proposed an ambitious program composed of a space shuttle, space station, and manned missions to the moon and Mars. It was too much. The proposal belonged to a different era, one in which NASA was still expanding. However, the idea of the space shuttle appealed to Nixon. Unlike the space station and the crewed missions, the shuttle oozed practicality. It was a shift away from space exploration and toward application. With reusable rockets and a trajectory that wouldn’t extend beyond a low Earth orbit, it had the possibility of making space travel available to everyone. The idea behind it could be traced to Wernher von Braun’s vision for space discovery, termed the “von Braun paradigm” and first described in the 1950s. Bizarrely enough, this vision was rooted in von Braun’s World War II background. He based the design for the space shuttle on the Nazi Amerika Bomber project, a winged rocket that would ascend to suborbital space before dropping bombs on New York City.

  With these unlikely beginnings, the White House reviewed the Space Task Group’s proposal. With a shrinking budget, cost-effective projects had priority. The first project Nixon approved was Skylab, the initial NASA space station, which had the double advantage of being relatively cheap and already developed. The operation employed what NASA called its Apollo Applications Program, which planned to use the leftover hardware from Apollo to support new missions. Carved out from the third stage of one of Apollo’s unused Saturn rockets, and including such features as a workshop and a solar observatory, Skylab launched in 1973. It was supported by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, von Braun’s old stomping grounds. However, the retired rocket scientist was no longer in Alabama; instead, at sixty-one, he was grappling with a cancer diagnosis.

  Von Braun’s Amerika Bomber, illustrated in 1947 (Popular Mechanics)

  It was NASA’s first experiment maintaining human life in space, with one crew prepared to spend eighty-four days aboard the station. It wasn’t, however, the first space station launched from Earth. The Soviet Union had launched one two years earlier. That mission, Salyut 1, ended in tragedy. In June 1971, after spending a record twenty-three days in space, the three-man crew was headed back home, speeding toward Earth in their reentry capsule. Outwardly, the Soyuz 11 mission capsule showed no damage, so it was a shock to the recovery team when they opened the hatch and found all three of the cosmonauts dead. They later determined that a pressure-equalization valve in the capsule had opened prematurely, sucking the air out of it and exposing Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev to the vacuum of space, making them the only humans in history to have perished outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

  Although it was an unfortunate accident caused by mechanical failure, the Soviets were wary of confirming the cause of death. They would only go as far to say that the casualties were “being investigated” and offered no details. With Skylab set to launch soon, NASA worried that extended time in space could be fatal. There was no way to be sure space was safe. It would be two years before the Western world was told the cause of the Soviet mission’s demise.

  In addition to Skylab, politicians viewed the shuttle program as cost-effective. The reusable “space bus” had the potential to ferry astronauts and equipment safely into outer space and back. Designs for the project began to pour in from private contractors, and in 1972, Nixon approved the winning design. Cost dominated the discussion while safety considerations took a backseat. The juicy $2.6 billion contract went to California-based North American Rockwell, a decision Jean Westwood, chair of the Democratic National Committee, decried as a “calculated use of the American taxpayers’ dollars for [Nixon’s] own pre-election purposes.” The influx of jobs in the Golden State would certainly help Nixon’s chances of grabbing its fifty-five votes in the electoral college, although it probably didn’t hurt that Rockwell was the lowest bidder.

  NASA set a hasty launch date for the shuttle: 1978. It would be composed of an orbiter, a massive fuel tank, and rocket boosters. The orbiter was designed to ride piggyback on the fuel tank. It launched like a rocket but then, after the fuel tank separated, it could glide back to Earth. Its design was familiar, resembling a typical airplane, and the hope was that the shuttle would eventually carry the astronauts with the same ease and comfort in which people rode commercial airliners. Once launched, the rocket boosters would separate from the shuttle, falling into the ocean, where a boat would recover them. The fuel tank, on the other hand, would be jettisoned over the atmosphere, destined for disintegration.

  As both Skylab and the space shuttle got the green light, other projects were struggling for approval. In 1973, Nixon canceled plans to put a large Earth-orbiting telescope in the sky. The device, later known as the Hubble Space Telescope, was still in development, and the hope had been to launch it from the space shuttle. Astronomers had long dreamed of a telescope that was free from the distortions of Earth’s atmosphere, allowing faint objects to be resolved more clearly than ever before. Although it had yet to be built, much less to deliver a single image, its cancellation provoked a strong response. A massive lobbying effort, fueled by astronomers and non-astronomers alike, reversed the decision. The Marshall Space Flight Center would assemble the telescope while the Goddard Space Flight Center would develop its scientific instrumentation.

  While all the proposed projects were defining a new generation of exploration at NASA, the massive budget for the space shuttle made the project especially prominent. Many at JPL saw it as competition. With the NASA budget shrinking, they knew that every dollar going to the shuttle was one less for exploration of the solar system. In the new funding climate, the engineers worried that the Grand Tour would get pushed aside.

  Although JPL was focused on exploring other planets, the Blue Marble photo of Earth hung all over the lab. Against the black of space, the ball of blue shone, the African continent and the south polar ice cap clear beneath whirling white clouds. Familiar as the image was, it also brought home the fragility of our planet. With Earth Day celebrated for the first time in 1970, the view of Earth from space drew attention to environmental issues. As Helen looked at the picture she found herself drawn to the oceans she had been assigned to work on, their deep blues covering most of Earth’s surface.

  Helen was working on a project called SEASAT, which would collect data on Earth’s oceans. The satellite, launched in June 1978 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, could measure sea surface winds and temperature, wave heights, and the ocean’s topography, employing sophisticated instrumentation that included a radar altimeter, a microwave scatterometer, and the first use of synthetic aperture radar in space. In its orbit, SEASAT was able to cover 95 percent of Earth with its remote sensing every thirty-six hours, peering into the oceans with even greater detail than they had anticipated. It was so sensitive it could even detect the position of submarines simply from the wake they left as they moved. Then, in October, a massive short circuit rocked the satellite, rendering it inoperative. Despite this blow, Helen was excited about the extensive data they had gathered. The mission was just the beginning, opening the door for a string of radar satellites that would be launched to study Earth. The radar system pioneered by SEASAT would also make its way onto the space shuttle.

  Meanwhile, Barbara was hard at work on a project called Viking. For the first time, they were planning to land a spacecraft on Mars. Although the chances of finding complex life on the planet had been crushed by Mariner, they still held out hope that a simple alien l
ife-form, perhaps something like Earth’s resilient bacteria, known as extremophiles, might inhabit the Red Planet. To find such creatures, the ship was designed with a robotic arm capable of digging up soil and analyzing it within its own contained laboratory. The data would then be sent back to Earth. In keeping with tradition at JPL, the mission was designed as a pair of spacecraft, providing two shots at success.

  The team designed each Viking to break into two pieces: an orbiter and a lander. The orbiter would survey the planet for a landing site and then drop the lander. The lander would deploy its parachute and sink safely to the surface. The orbiter would continue on its way, studying the Martian atmosphere while also acting as a relay station for the lander on the ground below.

  Barbara considered the options for Viking’s flight to Mars. She worked on different trajectories as they considered which path would be most successful. The mission would take place while Mars was farthest from Earth, 206 million miles. This would be a striking difference from the Mariner Mars missions, which had made a six-month journey. Viking’s journey would be an epic eleven months. To maintain contact at such a fantastic distance, JPL had to carefully align the ship’s trajectory to all six stations of the DSN, each equipped with huge dish antennas. Because Viking was 206 million miles away, it would take twenty minutes to send a message and another twenty to receive a reply. Barbara wrote computer programs that sent the ship all the way around the sun but never out of range of the DSN. Her maps resembled the delicate spiral of a seashell, with the ship curving out from Earth’s orbit, bending around the sun, and then joining Mars in its orbit.

  Barbara knew that even once they got the spacecraft to Mars it wouldn’t be easy going. The orbiter would take pictures of possible landing sites, but when it came time to drop the lander they would have to do so blindly, unsure exactly what the little robot would land on. It was distressing to think that all their work could be for nothing if the lander crashed onto uneven terrain. Barbara watched from California as each of the two Viking spacecraft launched in Florida in August and September 1975, only a month apart.