#Reviewing Rise of the Rocket Girls

After the release of the 2017 movie Hidden Figures, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book of the same title, Americans are more aware of the role women have played in the successful NASA missions that put humans into space and on the Moon. The women in that story were African American and worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA—the precursor to NASA) and eventually NASA’s center in Langley, Virginia. The women discussed in Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls worked on the other side of the country in Pasadena, California, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Instead of highlighting racial distinctions—although those issues are discussed—Holt introduces her readers to the female world of computing beginning in the early twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. What all these women had in common were their skills in mathematics that made their work an essential component of NASA’s human and robotic spaceflight endeavors.

Holt’s work documents the decades of contributions made by women at JPL. These women were originally called “computers” because they were the ones responsible for the complex calculations used for such maneuvers as tracking a rocket or satellite’s trajectory. The history of JPL goes back to the earliest days of the so-called Suicide Squad of experimenters at Caltech University—an arguably brilliant, but reckless band of proteges of aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán.[1] Barbara “Barby” Canright, the wife of a Suicide Squad member Richard Canright, joined the group as their mathematician. This Caltech group got funding in 1939 from the U.S. government to work on rocket development, which provided the foundation for JPL.[2] Holt’s story follows the work and the lives of the women who shaped the lab and its role in the space program.

While the story Holt tells is very much about the women as professionals, she also tries to emphasize how the women’s lives were a constant battle trying to balance their work and home lives. Many of the women married and had children, but before the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, these women often were given no choice but to leave their jobs once they became pregnant or at least once they got close to delivery. The book is as much a commentary on the culture of JPL and wider American society in the 1940s, ‘50s, ’60s, and beyond. One example Holt uses to highlight how JPL’s culture mimicked the American image of womens’ place in society was the “Miss Guided Missile” contest, essentially a beauty or popularity contest held at JPL every year. In the 1950s, the women of JPL saw it as a sign of the institute’s forward-thinking hiring process. According to Holt, the women at JPL saw the contest as an impossibility at other labs for the simple reason that other laboratories did not have enough women to hold such a contest. After JPL became a part of NASA—created in 1958—the contest’s name was changed to the Queen of Outer Space contest. But by 1970, increasing discussion of women’s rights meant that the contest seemed dismissive of their mathematical and professional talents and their overall value to the lab’s work and was discontinued.

Holt organized the book’s twelve chapters by decade, starting with the 1940s and coming up to  the present. While describing the work the women mathematicians were doing for the different missions JPL conducted, Holt also explores how changing technology shaped the computers’ work. In particular, when JPL introduced manual calculators and bulky IBM computers, the women had to learn new skills. By the time NASA started work on the Apollo Moon program, the women were keeping pace by taking classes at nearby Caltech to learn the newest programming languages, like FORTRAN. Holt notes that as the space program grew more sophisticated, so did the skills of the women whose stories she tells. Although they were hired as computers, the arrival of electronic computing technology did not diminish their value to JPL. In fact, women computers became the programmers for these new machines (as seen in Hidden Figures when Dorothy Vaughn programmed the Langley computers). These women were essential in making sure the male engineers’ designs were successful. Holt points out that by the 1960s, the women’s titles changed as well—from computers to engineers.

Holt is breaking relatively new ground in The Rise of the Rocket Girls. While the history of women scientists (including those in mathematics) is not new, it seems that part of the reason the computers at JPL are still less well-known lies in the nature of the laboratory’s work. Historically, JPL’s mission has largely focused on the development and launch of probes and satellites, such as the Ranger and Pioneer programs that sent robotic vehicles to the Moon so NASA could scout possible safe landing sites for the Apollo crews. While their work was essential to the success of the human spaceflight program, it was neither sexy nor patriotic in the same way that putting astronauts into space was for the American public. JPL’s mission and its computers have historically been more focused on exploration of the Solar System than on human spaceflight. Consequently, their stories have remained largely unknown even though they have one of the longest histories, going back to the 1930s. Holt’s book makes an important contribution to changing that narrative.

One of the valuable contributions that Holt’s book makes is that the narrative was built upon oral histories with many of the women highlighted in the book. While still grounded in archival research, Holt’s book includes the personal stories and experiences of these women that cannot be found in an archive. Holt’s book creates tension when launches or missions went awry; readers will feel the joy and excitement when the women witnessed the culmination of their work end in a successful mission. But readers will also see the ups and downs of working women in this era: weddings, births, the death of a newborn, and divorces. Holt constantly reminds the readers that these women, while talented and highly skilled in their jobs, were living regular lives when they left the office.

If the book has a weakness, it is that the science behind the missions these women helped make possible is often only given a cursory explanation, is not always clear, and, occasionally, is inaccurate. For example, the Galileo mission, which sent a spacecraft into orbit around Jupiter, had to be reworked after the space shuttle Challenger disaster because the original trajectory calculations were for a launch date that fell to the wayside as NASA recovered from the accident. In discussing the changes, Holt said, “The original upper-stage rocket selected to carry Galileo and the space shuttle crew into space was now deemed too dangerous.”[3] But that is not how the system worked. The Galileo spacecraft was launched from Kennedy Space Center in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Atlantis. Once in orbit, the shuttle crew deployed the Galileo spacecraft. It was only then that the upper-stage rocket sent Galileo on its way toward Jupiter; the space shuttle crew was not directly affected nor transported by Galileo’s upper-stage rocket. Admittedly, these are minor issues and do not affect the significance of the story Holt is telling. The limited scientific discussion does mean that the book as a whole is accessible to a large audience since a deeper familiarity of scientific and aerospace terminology and understanding is not necessary.

In short, Nathalia Holt’s book on the women of JPL and their contributions to the United States’ history in space is a welcome addition. JPL is only one of twenty NASA centers. The women and their contributions at each NASA center deserve attention and recognition. What Nathalia Holt has done with this book is remind readers that women’s work for NASA did propel us to the Moon and Mars.

Amy E. Foster is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Florida. She teaches courses on the history of the US space program, and the history of science, technology, and medicine.

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Header Image: Earth, Moon, and Mars (Lockheed Martin)

Notes:

[1] Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars (New York: Back Bay Books, 2017), 12-15.

[2] Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Timeline, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/timeline/.

[3] Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls, 263.