Rise of the Rocket Girls

by Nathalia Holt

  The next year they gathered multiple times in the auditorium, shuffling sleeping bags out of their way. Many engineers, especially the young ones without families at home, camped out in the lab, mesmerized as thousands of images flashed on the screen. Before their eyes, Saturn’s rings came through so clear and crisp it seemed you could reach out and touch them. Voyager 2 flew above the rings as the light shone through them, revealing more dazzling loops of ice, dust, and rock than had been thought possible. Some of the rings intertwined, like golden jewelry hoops, while others possessed odd spokes, sticking out like carriage wheels. There were so many rings that eventually Bradford Smith, leader of JPL’s imaging science team, gave up trying to keep track of them all for reporters. Exasperated, he told the press corps, “You count them.”

  The Voyagers left Saturn nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. At JPL, the staff was elated to learn that NASA would keep supporting the mission beyond Saturn. Their stealthy plan had worked; the Voyagers could keep exploring the solar system. Voyager 1 left first, headed directly for the edge of the solar system, while Voyager 2 would make a five-year journey to Uranus before trailing its twin into deep space. Then, disaster struck. The platform on Voyager 2 holding two of its cameras jammed. The cameras kept taking pictures, but only of the endless night of space. JPL couldn’t point the lenses to their targets any longer; the mission was in danger of not being able to capture any more of the images it needed. The engineers working on Voyager fruitlessly tried to come up with a way to turn the camera around toward the planets. Then they had a lucky accident. One of the flight controllers mistakenly sent a command to Voyager to rotate the stuck platform at ten times the typical force. The forceful twist did the trick; the cameras could now be inched around at low speed. It seemed that in their frenzy to take pictures, the engineers had inadvertently locked up the system. Now, as long as they kept their movements slow and careful, they could still capture the beauty and mysteries of Uranus and Neptune. They just had to wait for the ship to reach them—only another 1.7 billion miles to go.

  The Voyager missions were a tour like none other and brought the staff at JPL closer together. They gawked as they watched the images streaming into the auditorium and then played softball together, bowled, or went hiking. And Voyager made them incredibly proud. Their hard work and dedication had produced images that seemed too beautiful to be real. As their spacecraft explored the solar system, they couldn’t help but be struck by how singular Earth was. Eventually traveling 13 billion miles, the mission made clear that, with its swirls of white clouds sailing above blue seas, our planet was alone in the solar system in its ability to support life. Yet beyond these nine planets, the JPL team felt, they were creeping closer to unexplored galaxies, to a universe filled with the possibility of life beyond the blue marble. The ships just keep exploring, transmitting data back to Earth as they leave the regions touched by our sun and enter the space between the stars. Voyager 1 was the first to enter this interstellar space, with Voyager 2 at its heels. Around 2025 their power, fueled by three batteries filled with a decaying lump of plutonium-238, will run out. Yet the ships will silently continue their journey. For those lucky enough to be part of the team at JPL, Voyager stands as the culmination of their careers—their most beautiful, important accomplishment.

  While Voyager opened a new view of the solar system, Helen was continuing to hire women at a rapid pace, albeit at the whim of NASA budgets. “We’re a sisterhood,” teased Merrilyn Gilchrist as she welcomed the new hires. The sisters cultivated their friendships both in and out of the lab, spending countless hours together.

  Although three decades had passed since Macie Roberts began her policy of hiring solely women, Helen was unapologetically carrying on the tradition. When Macie hired new women she had often told them, “In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.” In some ways, her advice still rang true. If you wanted to be one of Helen’s team, you certainly had to be a woman.

  When Macie was hiring Barbara, Helen, and Sue, her view of women in science was as limited as the boundaries of space JPL had penetrated up to that time. She couldn’t have dreamed what was ahead for them or foreseen the responsibility they would earn. She certainly never expected to see computers advancing to be Mission Design managers, like Phyllis Buwalda, or leading their own teams on explorations of the universe, like Sylvia.

  Helen honored Macie’s legacy of hiring bright women with education and experience in math and computer science. Her mentoring encompassed not just the importance of advanced degrees but also the balance of working while raising children. Helen had been following this vision for a decade, watching as her hires worked their way up the ranks, but now she was really stepping up her numbers. Grandfathered in to her position as an engineer, she had no need of a degree, yet she pushed the coursework on every woman she hired.

  Sue Finley, on the other hand, had never been a fan of school. She disliked it so much that she had dropped out of college, never to return. So she was surprised to see an envelope on her desk one day—some routine correspondence about a mission she was working on—emblazoned with the words Dr. Sue Finley. She picked it up and caressed it lightly. She wasn’t a doctor, of course, but the envelope meant something to her. This is what my colleagues think of me, she thought with pride. She tucked the envelope away carefully, a prized memento. When she was feeling discouraged she could look at it and be reminded of her value to the lab.

  Sue was working on a new mission—a cooperative venture between the French space agency, the Centre National d’Études Spatiales; the Soviet space program; and NASA—to put two balloons, with instruments dangling, into Venus’s atmosphere. The balloons were designed to have a short lifetime, only forty-six hours. During their nearly two-day exploration, they would travel a third of the way around the planet, floating miles above the surface. Hanging from each balloon would be a “gondola” containing sensors to measure temperature, pressure, wind velocity, cloud particle density, the amount of ambient light in the sky, and even the frequency of lightning strikes. It would be painted with a white varnish designed to protect the contents from the corrosive sulfuric acid of the planet’s atmosphere. The entire apparatus, balloons and gondolas, was hitching a ride on the Soviets’ Vega mission, a rocket destined for a rendezvous with Halley’s Comet.

  Only days apart in June 1985, the balloons were dropped off on the night side of the planet, in an area known as the Mermaid Valley, chosen for its relatively cooler temperatures of only 800 degrees Fahrenheit. At thirty-three miles above the surface, parachutes attached to each Teflon-coated plastic balloon were released, and the balloons soon began to fill with helium gas. Engineers had worried that if they placed the balloons in direct sunlight, the helium inside would explode. Now, in the darkness, the balloons bobbed up and down in the Venusian winds before they began transmitting data.

  Though the project would use French scientific equipment and a Russian spacecraft, Sue’s expertise on the Deep Space Network was essential. The network had expanded from a few well-placed stations to a grid of communication stations across the globe. She could have scarcely imagined collaborating with the Russians when she started at JPL, at the height of the Cold War, thirty years earlier. But now it was 1985, and the once-warring nations worked together, tracking the weak signal of the balloons. Sue updated the software so the worldwide network of antennas could follow the balloons, the enormous parabolic dishes turning automatically. Unfortunately the program kept failing. She started plugging in the commands by hand, just as she had in the old days. Some habits die hard, she thought, smiling to herself.

  Hours later in the control room, Sue and three male team members waited to see if the mission would be a success. The room was dark, and no one made a noise. Instead they kept their eyes trained on the monitor. It was pitch-black, showing no activity. Then suddenly, dots began to appear. The antenna at Goldstone had caught the balloons’ signal. Su
e couldn’t believe her hand-plotting had worked. She started jumping up and down, overcome by excitement and relief after so much hard work. It was the best feeling in the world. When the moment passed she looked around at her colleagues; she had been the only one leaping for joy. She felt foolish only for an instant before she saw her excitement reflected in their smiles.

  Along with the successes there was sadness too: Margie was leaving the lab. Her second marriage was falling apart, and she wanted to give the fragile union every chance she could. With six children to care for, she felt she was needed at home. Everyone was sad to see her go. It was as if she had grown up in the lab. Barbara could still picture Margie at eighteen, learning the ropes. Macie had always believed in her, giving her precious opportunities, such as the historic launch of Explorer 1. Thirty years later it was time for Margie to let go. The women had a farewell party, promising they would keep in touch.

  Helen, Sue, and Barbara, however, had no thoughts of retirement. They were too busy. A new mission was monopolizing their thoughts: Galileo. The view from Voyager had whetted JPL’s appetite for Jupiter and its mysterious moons, and the women were plotting trajectories that would use the gravitational pull of the moons to power the spacecraft around the planet. At the same time, they were working on how to keep in contact with the spacecraft as it traveled nearly three billion miles. The amount of work was overwhelming. Barbara barely had time to eat lunch. She would run over to the cafeteria and quickly have a chocolate shake and a croissant sandwich before heading back to work. She was gaining weight from her unhealthy diet, but she didn’t have time for anything else.

  On January 28, 1986, Barbara skipped breakfast and came in to work early. The lab was quiet that morning because almost everybody was watching the twenty-fifth space shuttle launch on TV. There had been far fewer than the sixty launches a year that had been proposed in 1972, when the shuttle project was first announced, yet it was enough to make space travel feel safe. All over the lab, staff crowded around TV sets, especially excited to see Christa McAuliffe, who would be the first civilian in space, a teacher, aboard the Challenger. Only three years earlier the Challenger had made history when it carried Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Although JPL worked only on crewless missions and had little to do with the space shuttle, McAuliffe had captivated Helen’s girls. She was one of them: a mother of young children with experience and accomplishments that resonated across the nation, particularly with women.

  While it was a mild day in Pasadena, in Florida the weather was unusually cold. However, after six delays, everyone was eager for the launch to go forward. At JPL they watched with enthusiasm, knowing that the next space shuttle launch would likely propel Galileo on its journey to Jupiter. Galileo was quietly putting pressure on Challenger. Since the mission was scheduled for liftoff in just four months, a date that depended on the unalterable alignment of the planets, NASA felt especially compelled to get this shuttle off the ground. Another mission was also waiting: the Hubble Telescope was finally slated for a launch in 1986, after multiple delays in development. The schedule for the shuttle was packed.

  While those at JPL admired the grandiose space vehicle, hidden inside the shuttle’s boosters was a beautiful eleven-point star, the same design that had its origins in the dreams of a British scientist during World War II and the research performed by the computers at JPL in the 1950s. The star had been an essential part of the shuttle’s big booster rockets from the beginning.

  The launch at first seemed like any other, with the immense rocket carrying the crew of seven into a clear blue sky. The shuttle ascended, a river of puffy, white clouds billowing from its exhaust nozzle. A little more than a minute later, however, tragedy struck. Across the country, people watched live footage of the shuttle exploding and then breaking apart, the rocket boosters sending white tendrils of smoke twisting through the heavens. Those on board—McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, Francis R. Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Michael J. Smith, and Ellison S. Onizuka—wouldn’t survive.

  The disaster was caused by a rubber loop: an O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster had failed. The Rogers Commission, tasked by President Reagan with investigating the disaster, later found that concerns over the O-ring were raised years earlier by engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center. A memo sent in January 1978 from the chief of the Solid Rocket Motor branch at Marshall to his superior specifically pointed out problems with the O-ring and stated that proper sealing of the joint maintained by O-ring pressure was “mandatory to prevent hot gas leaks and resulting catastrophic failure.” Despite numerous objections, the design wasn’t changed. NASA minimized the issue while Thiokol, the manufacturer, stated, “The condition is not desirable but is acceptable.”

  But as the temperature dropped on January 27, 1986, some at Thiokol had begun to worry. Engineers Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly recommended delaying the launch until the next afternoon. They were concerned that the cool temperatures could make the O-rings stiff and degraded, unable to do their job sealing the joint between two segments of the solid rocket motor. Boisjoly had agonized over the O-rings for the past year in his position on the seal task force at Thiokol. On July 31, 1985, he wrote a memorandum about his concerns with O-ring erosion, saying, “It is my honest and very real fear that if we do not take immediate action… then we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launch pad facilities.” Needless to say, with concerns over O-rings foremost, McDonald and Boisjoly refused to sign the launch recommendation the night before liftoff in January 1986. NASA managers overruled their objections, approving the launch. Yet despite the engineers’ premonitions, when the disaster unfolded, they were shocked. Their vindication brought only torment.

  Watching the explosion at JPL, Sue started to cry; she never wanted to see another launch again. One of the other women went in to tell Barbara, who, concentrating on her work on Galileo, still didn’t know. The women were shocked and saddened. They were reminded of the dark day when Apollo 1 had burst into flames on the launchpad. It was now only 9 a.m. and they had a busy day ahead, but no one could work. With the disaster occupying their thoughts, their programming felt trivial.

  Their emotions raw, the women headed to the auditorium, where images from Voyager were on a constant feed during planetary flybys. Only a few days earlier Voyager 2 had encountered Uranus. Now they sat in the hushed room as if it were a church. They held hands and watched as images of Uranus and its moons filled the screen, acting as a balm to their shock and hurt.

  Uranus was a solemn crescent, with an ocean of boiling water hidden beneath its clouds, while its small moon, Miranda, had a curious pattern of chevrons running across the surface before dropping into deep cliffs. The engineers and scientists were astounded by their first peek at the moon; it was nothing like the dead, cratered surface they expected. Despite only flying by Miranda for five and a half hours, Voyager 2 delivered images that revealed deep chasms, ten times the depth of Earth’s Grand Canyon.

  It would be more than three years before Voyager 2 reached Neptune. On August 25, 1989, in celebration of the last stop of the Grand Tour, Chuck Berry performed in the JPL courtyard. His song “Johnny B. Goode” was included in the gold record carried by the spacecraft. In the warmth of a summer evening, the staff and their family and friends danced outside. The mood felt carefree as they celebrated the final signpost of the Grand Tour. They had received the last images of Neptune, which shone a bold blue, only two days previously. Amid the bustle of the lab the planet seemed clear and still. Yet behind its calm blue façade were whipping winds, at 1,242 miles per hour the fastest ever recorded anywhere.

  After the Challenger disaster, space shuttle missions had been put on hold, so Galileo had to be postponed. The delay meant its trajectory would have to change significantly. Since the ship’s course had been carefully plotted to coincide with the position of Jupiter at a particular time, the team would have to start over with a new path. In addition, the or
iginal upper-stage rocket selected to carry Galileo and the space shuttle crew into space was now deemed too dangerous. With a different, less powerful rocket substituted, they would have to further alter Galileo’s path, no longer plotting a straight line through space but instead relying on gravity assist. Luckily, they had a lot of experience with the maneuver. They’d swing twice by Earth and once by Venus to get enough momentum to send the spacecraft all the way to Jupiter. The three-year trip was now extended to a six-year journey.

  Barbara’s boss on Galileo was Johnny Driver, and he lived up to his name. He worked long hours and inspired all the other engineers to do the same. Barbara was trying to fix one troublesome part of Galileo’s programming. Unlike most of JPL’s missions, which were constructed in pairs, Galileo was an only child. Everything relied on the success of the single spacecraft. The number of intercommunicating computer systems made work on the project even more taxing. The challenge wasn’t fixing the program but searching through the mass of code to find the troublesome piece. When Barbara finally located it, she yelped in excitement. Her enthusiasm, however, was short-lived. Seeing her success, Driver started to bring the difficult work to her. Above all, simplicity was their priority in building the computer code. Although their objectives were more sophisticated than ever, in some ways coding hadn’t changed much from the early days at JPL. They wanted to write a clean code that made it easy to find bugs while using the fewest lines possible.

  Of course programming had become more complex. FORTRAN had new capabilities the women could have scarcely imagined two decades earlier. The computer language could manage large-scale programs with far greater capacity and handle errors in the code with better flexibility. The women were learning a new language as well: HAL. It stood for “High-Order Assembly Language” and was in use all over NASA. The women laughed at the name. They would mock the program by speaking to each other in calm monotones like those of the malevolent computer HAL 9000 from the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Working with HAL and FORTRAN wasn’t easy, and the use of the two computer programs only added to the complexity of Galileo’s software.