Galaxy Girls Page 4

  Margaret was in charge of the team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo Lunar Module and Command Module, the spacecraft that would take American astronauts to the Moon. It was a very steep learning curve for them all as no one had done this sort of thing before. They knew that there were no second chances for their software—it needed to work perfectly—and so they took the work very seriously.

  Margaret tried to spend as much time as possible with her young daughter, Lauren, during this busy period by taking her to work in the evenings and on weekends. One day Lauren was playing with a test version of the computer and accidentally crashed the software. Margaret wanted to fix the code to prevent astronauts from doing the same thing, but NASA would not let her, saying they wouldn’t make the same mistake as a young child. But during the Apollo 8 mission, astronaut Jim Lovell inadvertently did exactly that and accidentally wiped some data. Margaret and her team had to fix the problem while the crew was in space.

  All the long hours and hard work paid off. The software they had developed was so robust that no bugs were ever found. Even when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on their final descent to the Moon and the computer became overloaded, it was able to prioritize its functions so the crew could land safely. The software formed the basis of that later used in Skylab and the Space Shuttle, as well as the digital systems in airplanes. Margaret’s pioneering work continues to keep humans reaching for the stars.

  “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

  The Waltham “Little Old Ladies”

  TEXTILE WORKERS

  WATCHMAKERS

  USA

  1960s

  PRECISION WORKERS WEAVING APOLLO’S GUIDANCE COMPUTER MEMORY

  The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was groundbreaking but even so, it was nothing like the computers of today. We are used to handheld smartphones and tablets on which programs can easily be installed and uninstalled. When the AGC was being designed in the 1960s, computer disks were extremely fragile. There was no way they would survive the vibrations and g-forces of a rocket launch.

  Instead, the engineers who designed the computer used “rope memory.” Computer code language is made up of 1s and 0s, which when written into “words” will tell the computer what to do. Rope memory is made up of rings and fine copper wires—a wire going through a ring represents a 1, and one going around the outside a 0, together writing the instructions for the computer.

  When the engineers looked at their designs, they saw that the AGC would require thousands of detailed and painstakingly handmade parts. They turned to the women of Waltham, Massachusetts, experts in weaving textiles and making watches.

  To build the rope memory, two women would sit opposite each other in front of a loom. They would read the written computer program and weave it into the rope by passing a needle with the copper wire in it backward and forward. The work was painstakingly slow—one program could take several months to weave and errors were time-consuming to correct. The ladies knew that the lives of the astronauts going to the Moon depended on their handiwork, so they did their utmost to produce work of the very best standard.

  The engineers who wrote the programs nicknamed this technique the LOL method, after “Little Old Ladies,” though this was a hugely misleading description. These women were so important and skilled that sometimes they were paid just to do nothing, to make sure they weren’t busy on another job when they were needed.

  This process of making the rope memory was very cumbersome but it meant that it was impossible for the program to be deleted. When the Apollo 12 launch vehicle was struck by lightning just thirty-six seconds after liftoff, the sudden electrical discharge through the rocket knocked some systems offline. Thanks to the rope memory, the computers rebooted themselves, mission control responded to the problem and the crew continued on their way to orbit and the Moon.

  Sadly, so many of the names of the women who spent hours lovingly building these computers appear, for now, to be lost in time, but their contributions have not been forgotten.

  “We used to go to the cafeteria and the astronauts would come in . . . They’d explain the Moon shot and thank us for what a good job we were doing.”

  MARY LOU ROGERS, one of the ladies who worked on the Apollo line

  Poppy Northcutt

  ENGINEER

  LAWYER

  USA

  BORN 1943 →

  FIRST FEMALE ENGINEER IN MISSION CONTROL

  Poppy Northcutt has spent her whole life breaking the mold. She studied math at university, not just because she enjoyed it, but also because she saw it would help her to reach higher-paid roles than those traditionally available to women. After graduating she took her talent for math to work at an aerospace company. Here she solved very difficult equations for the engineers who were working on software that calculated how to get a spacecraft back from the Moon. Poppy was fascinated by her work, so she asked lots of questions and even took the computer code home with her to study it at night. Before long she was finding mistakes in the code and was promoted to engineer.

  Apollo 8 was the first mission that would take human beings to orbit the Moon, a four-day journey of about two hundred and fourty thousand miles. During a flight, astronauts in a spacecraft are supported by a team of engineers in mission control, who monitor everything that is going on. They are a vital part of the mission, sending commands, solving problems, keeping the astronauts safe and well. The computer code that Poppy and her colleagues had been working on was used to calculate the trajectories for the Apollo 8 mission’s return, so they were chosen to give operational support. Poppy was the first female engineer to don a headset and work in mission control.

  Poppy and her team were rushed in to help when disaster struck the Apollo 13 mission. The oxygen tank exploded, crippling the spacecraft, and the crew could no longer land on the Moon as planned. Poppy and her colleagues had to use their computer programs to quickly work out new trajectories for the spacecraft. Thanks to their lightning-speed calculations they devised a new path for the spacecraft to get back to Earth safely.

  Working at NASA, Poppy was aware that she was leading the charge for women into a historically male world. She was passionate about fighting for women’s rights and decided to go into politics and law. She changed legislation so that women were allowed to wear trousers to work and weren’t treated any differently from men, whether they worked for the police or the fire department. She also went on to become a fantastic criminal defense lawyer. Poppy’s time in mission control blazed the way for the many women who have followed in her footsteps, and she continues to fight for women’s rights to this day.

  “I started looking around at these dudes that were working with me and I thought, ‘You know, I’m as smart as they are.’”

  Rita Rapp

  PHYSIOLOGIST

  NUTRITIONIST

  USA

  1928 → 1990

  SERVING UP SOME FLAVOR IN ORBIT

  Rita Rapp was responsible for one of the most important parts of any mission. She joined NASA in 1961 in the early days of the space program and started working on the Mercury project, designing in-flight items such as exercise devices and medical packs, but within a few years moved to the Apollo program to plan what the astronauts would eat in space.

  The food eaten by the Mercury astronauts wasn’t very tasty—it was mostly puree squeezed out of a tube, or bite-sized cubes of compressed food, covered in gelatin. Food in space floats, just like everything else, which makes crumbs very problematic: instead of falling to the floor they can clog up filters or even get in astronauts’ eyes. During the Gemini flights, the food was a little better, but still fairly bland. Gus Grissom smuggled one of his favorite corned-beef sandwiches onto a flight, but it disintegrated as soon as he pulled it out of his pocket!

  Rita was responsible for all the food that the astronauts would eat before and during their missions for Apollo, Skylab and the early days of the Shuttle. She was determi
ned to make it taste as good as possible and to give the crews food that was much more like what they ate when on Earth. She worked hard to improve nutrition, to design and develop new food-packaging systems, and even add cutlery. Rita would also bake homemade bite-size cookies for the crew. These were so tasty that during the Skylab missions they were used as onboard currency, with personal cookie allocations being traded for favors.

  Space food today is not dissimilar from what we eat at home. In order to reduce weight, and therefore launch costs, much is sent in a dehydrated state, like instant mashed potato. The astronauts simply add hot or cold water, wait a few minutes, then cut open the plastic pouch and eat. Other food comes in tins or metallic pouches, and is warmed in a device that is a cross between a suitcase and a sandwich grill. Things like chocolate, nuts or biscuits go just as they are.

  Rita knew that if astronauts had food they liked, they would work better in space. They were all very grateful for her pioneering efforts, transforming their meals from “cubes and tubes” to the space version of haute cuisine.

  “You can’t just go to the grocery and put things on board. It’s a challenge, but I enjoy meeting the challenge and accomplishing the end.”

  Dottie Lee

  AEROSPACE ENGINEER

  USA

  BORN 1937 →

  CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS FOR APOLLO’S HEAT SHIELD

  Dottie Lee was there at the beginning of space travel. A natural mathematician, she studied math at university with plans to become a teacher but instead her career went on to take a galactic route.

  In 1948 she started at NACA, later to become NASA, as a “computer,” a term that meant something different than it does today: someone who supported the engineers, working out sums on huge mechanical calculators. One day she was asked to cover for a secretary and in between answering phone calls she solved an incredibly difficult calculation. The secretary’s boss was so impressed that he asked her to join his engineering team. Dottie learned everything she could, working on more and more complicated projects, eventually becoming an expert in aerodynamics and heat shields.

  When spacecraft come back to Earth, they have to slow down. One way to do this is to fire up the rocket engines for a long time, but this uses a lot of fuel. Instead, engineers choose to use the drag of the atmosphere to slow the spacecraft. A capsule coming back from a low orbit does fire its engines for a few minutes, slowing it to about 5 miles per second, but the Apollo flights coming back from the Moon just aimed straight at the Earth, reentering the atmosphere at about 7 miles per second. When a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere it hits the air molecules with great force, causing the surfaces to heat up to very high temperatures, over 2,912 degrees Fahrenheit. If an object has no protection, it will burn up in the atmosphere, like a meteorite, so spacecraft bringing humans or other cargo back to Earth have a protective surface, called a heat shield. Dottie and her team calculated the amount of heat that the Apollo spacecraft would have to withstand and made sure that the design would protect the crew inside.

  Dottie was always a step ahead—when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the Moon, she was already in meetings starting to design NASA’s next spacecraft, the Space Shuttle. She became responsible for making sure it didn’t overheat on the way to or from space, and for designing the heat shield, which on the Shuttle was lots of clever ceramic tiles. The nose of the Shuttle became known as “Dottie’s nose” after she came up with the best shape.

  Dottie worked for NASA for her entire career, always enthusiastic about her work, and a role model for all. She was so good at her job that when she retired they had to hire ten people to cover all the work that she used to do.

  “You learn with each experience, of course, and that’s what I did every day of my life.”

  The ILC Seamstresses

  SEAMSTRESSES

  USA

  1960s

  MADE-TO-MEASURE SPACESUITS

  ELLIE FORAKER, MADELEINE IVORY, BERT PILKENTON and CECIL WEBB were among the expert seamstresses who made women’s underwear for the International Latex Company (ILC). It came as something of a surprise to them when they were asked to use their talents to make the most complex garment ever created.

  When NASA wanted to make the spacesuits for the Apollo moonwalkers, they needed a design strong enough to survive the extremes of space, but which would also let the astronauts move. They turned to ILC, who came up with a game-changing design. It included a brilliant piece of engineering for the joints, making them like a concertina—an idea now familiar in bendy drinking straws but revolutionary at the time.

  ILC custom-made three spacesuits for each astronaut—one for training, one for flight and one as an emergency backup. Each was a mini spaceship, providing air to breathe, communications with the crew, and even a diaper just in case. To achieve all this, each suit was made of twenty-one different layers, sewn one inside the other.

  These mind-blowingly intricate suits were all made by hand, using regular sewing machines. Pins were strictly rationed as any forgotten ones could puncture the layers and cause disaster. The workload was huge and some teams worked around the clock to get the job done. They all knew that their handiwork was the only thing protecting the astronauts on the moonwalks, so they did their very best and the astronauts really appreciated it. Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, wrote them a note one day: “Thank you for sewing straight and careful. I would hate to have a tear in my pants while on the Moon.” The women were incredibly proud of their work and left their names inside the suits.

  When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and ventured out onto the surface, taking humankind’s first footsteps on another world, everyone at ILC was holding their breath. It was the first time that their work had ever been used in space and they watched anxiously as the two men bent and flexed, stumbling and falling as they learned how to walk in the Moon’s gravity. They needn’t have worried; their dedication and skill had produced brilliant spacesuits—flexible and tough, and perfect for working on the Moon.

  Ellie, Ruth and others went on to make suits for the Space Shuttle spacewalks and parachutes for Mars rovers. ILC is currently developing new suits that one day might be worn on Mars. From bras to Mars, the skill of these women has kept astronauts alive and humanity landing safely on new worlds.

  “I had something to do that was great. I did something great in my lifetime. I built the suit that went to the Moon.”

  BERT PILKENTON

  Space Stations and Shuttles

  1972 → 2000

  After the last footprints on the Moon were made in 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union turned their attention to new goals. They started to work together in space, rather than competing. The Soviets focused on space stations, starting out by building the Salyut spacecraft, and then the first modular space station, Mir. The United States developed the first reusable spacecraft, their fleet of Space Shuttles, which would haul satellites, telescopes and scientific instruments into space. Both began inviting people from other countries to fly with them, and the world of space travel became an international endeavor.

  Sally Ride

  Svetlana Savitskaya

  Nichelle Nichols

  Christa McAuliffe & Judy Resnik

  Mae Jemison

  Helen Sharman

  Eileen Collins

  Chiaki Mukai

  Claudie Haigneré

  Patricia Cowings

  Irene Long

  Sally Ride

  PHYSICIST

  ASTRONAUT

  USA

  1951 → 2012

  FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN IN SPACE

  Sally Ride was an intensely private individual, an introvert who liked to keep herself to herself. But her drive, her skill and her intelligence meant that she went on to be known around the world.

  Growing up, Sally was a brilliantly talented tennis player but she also loved math and science, and particularly physics. She could have successfully followed eit
her passion but decided that science would be the better option for her in the long term. She was in the final months of completing her PhD in astrophysics when she saw an ad in her university newspaper recruiting for astronauts and, for the first time, encouraging women to apply. Sally thought to herself, “I could do that—it sounds like fun.”

  In 1978 she was hired by NASA as an astronaut and, along with thirty-five other people, trained to fly the new Space Shuttle. There were five other women: Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judy Resnik, Rhea Seddon and Kathryn Sullivan. NASA was almost completely male at the time, so they had to show their colleagues that women are as capable as men. Slowly, over time, the talent and drive of the new recruits shone through and it became clear that it didn’t matter if you were male or female.

  Sally had great knowledge and skill in operating the Shuttle’s robotic arm and was selected to fly on the fifth Shuttle mission. When the crew of seven blasted off in June 1983, the world’s media was focused on the first female American astronaut, though Sally wanted just to be part of the team. The mission went very smoothly, the whole crew playing their part; successfully launching two satellites and carrying out lots of experiments before returning to Earth after six days. When she came back, Sally saw what an impact her flight had had on people and she realized what an inspiration she had been, in particular to young people all around the world. Sally resolved to keep helping them follow their dreams in science and technology.