Summary and Analysis of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars: Based on the Book by Nathalia Holt
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Summary and Analysis of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars: Based on the Book by Nathalia Holt
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About Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt:
When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory first began researching rocket science and the possibilities within space exploration in the middle of the twentieth century, they hired a hyper intelligent group of female mathematicians to work with their staff of engineers.
In Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Nathalia Holt examines four decades of the JPL’s major accomplishments from interviews and research of these groundbreaking women who were recruited to be “human computers,” Including, from this team of unsung heroes, Barbara Paulson, Helen Ling, Sue Finley, and Sylvia Lundy.
As the JPL’s projects evolved from developing missiles and satellites to executing moon landings and planetary exploration projects, the women’s roles grew too, becoming the team responsible for launching America into Space—and they did it all while balancing marriage and children, too.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504046374 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| Sales rank: | 605,781 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars
Based on the Book by Nathalia Holt
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4637-4
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Preface
In 2010, author Nathalia Holt was pregnant and searching for the perfect name for her daughter. After tentatively settling on Eleanor Frances, she researched the name and came across Eleanor Francis Helin, a scientist who had worked for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) beginning in the 1950s and had discovered more than eight hundred asteroids and comets over the course of her career. Holt, a scientist herself, was both pleased to find such a namesake for her daughter and intrigued by the woman's career in rocket science, a male-dominated field. She dedicated herself to learning more about Helin and the other women who worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab in its early days.
Need to Know: Eleanor Francis Helin passed away in 2009, so Holt was unable to speak with her, but much of the personal information in Rise of the Rocket Girls comes from the author's interviews with scientists profiled in the book.
January 1958: Launch Day
An unnamed female computer (someone who did calculations by hand before the age of electro-mechanical computers) and the rest of the team at JPL wait nervously for their satellite, launched earlier that day, to go into orbit. If it makes it out of the atmosphere and begins to circle the planet, their device will be the first American satellite in space. After sixteen hours of waiting and calculating, the unidentified woman determines that the satellite has reached a high enough point in its trajectory to exit the atmosphere, a beep detecting its signal confirms her math, and the team celebrates their victory.
Need to Know: The American team at JPL was desperate for their satellite launch to succeed because the USSR was ahead in the Space Race, having launched Sputnik the year before.
Part I: 1940s
Chapter 1: Up, Up, and Away
In the 1930s, Barby and Richard Canright eloped and moved to Pasadena, California, where Barby attended classes at Occidental College and worked as a typist while Richard worked toward his graduate degree at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). On Caltech's campus, they met and became friends with Jack Parsons, Frank Malina, and Ed Forman, a group of young scientists who formed what was known as the Suicide Squad. Some of the United States' earliest rocket experimenters, the group earned its name by igniting explosives that endangered themselves and other students — and caused extensive property damage.
Eventually, the group got kicked off the Caltech campus, but by then, they had attracted the attention of the US government. In 1939, they received a $1,000 grant from the National Academy of Sciences, then $10,000 from the Army Air Corps to help fund rocket plane research. With these resources, the group was able to hire employees, including Richard and Barby, the latter becoming the first female computer for the future Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Seeking a more secluded area to perform their loud, risky experiments, the group moved their operations to Arroyo Seco, a dry, uninhabited canyon outside Pasadena. During the 1940s, most of the scientific community considered rocket science eccentric at best, but the army saw something they needed in the theoretical "rocket plane" (a plane with rockets strapped to it, the precursor to jet engines). Jet-assisted takeoff, or JATO, would help bombers launch off short runways, a priority during World War II that intensified after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The scientists attached JATO units to a small plane that was chained to the ground; in their first trials, they reduced takeoff distance by half. By August 1941, they powered a launch without any propellers: It was the first American rocket-powered airplane flight.
JPL's early success with JATO confirmed their reputation and ensured continued access to funding. As they turned their focus to developing rocket propellant, they also hired more employees, including Macie Roberts, Melba Nead, and Virginia Prettyman. The female-driven computer department had begun.
Need to Know: Most of the scientists at JPL studied rocketry because they were inspired by the prospect of exploring outer space, not by creating stronger weapons for earthly warfare. Some of the founding members of JPL were so put off by the moral ambiguity of weaponry that they left the company or profession; but without the military funding early on, JPL might have been over before it even started.
Chapter 2: Headed West
While early JPL employees were creating the first successful rocket planes and assisting with the war effort, future members of the computer team were making their own unique ways to Pasadena. Helen Yee Ling Chow, originally from the Philippines, lived with her family in British Hong Kong in 1941. She hid in a closet with her brother, Edwin, when the Japanese bombed the city (on the same day as Pearl Harbor), and moved frequently with her family after, as they tried to stay safe. Despite tumultuous times, Helen's mother was strict about her children's education, and Helen had a talent for math. After attending Canton College for two years, she received a full-ride scholarship to attend the University of Notre Dame and moved on her own to Indiana to major in art and minor in math.
Like Barby Canright, Barbara Lewis grew up in Ohio. After her dad died when she was 14, her older sisters attended college and then moved to California. When Barbara turned 19, she and her mother also headed west. Barbara lived in Altadena and attended junior college until her sister, who worked as a secretary at JPL, got her an interview to be a computer.
Susan Greene was a California native who attended Scripps, an allwomen's college, but took advanced math classes at the neighboring men's college, Claremont. Her first computer job was at Convair, part of the booming aerospace industry, but after getting married and pregnant she left that company. Soon after, she had a stillbirth, and without a job she felt rudderless.
After graduating from Notre Dame, Helen moved to Pasadena to join her family, who had also relocated to the United States. She had hoped to find work decorating department store windows, but she was unable to find employment. Desperate for a job (and being a math whiz who never dreamed she could work in the male-dominated science sector), she applied for a computer position at JPL, where Edwin was a structural engineer.
Need to Know: Though many of JPL's first female employees had taken advanced math and science classes in high school and college, they had done so mostly for pleasure — they hardly expected to find employment where they could use their skills. Despite their talent and hard work, there was no promotional pathway out of the computer department; rather, their male employers expected that they would abandon their posts as soon as they got married and had children.
Part II: 1950s
Chapter 3: Rockets Rising
JPL continued its missile projects after the end of WWII, but the experiments were beginning to foretell future projects that were more concerned with space than warfare. In 1945, a Corporal missile prototype flew higher than any rocket had before, grazing the edge of the atmosphere forty miles in the air. The computers' equations became concerned with creating a liquid propellant that was strong enough to launch rockets without causing their engines to pulse and explode. Their computations regarding the balance of liquid hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen contributed to the development of hypergolic propellant, which would eventually power all manner of spacecraft.
As JPL's operations expanded, so did the size of their workforce. Macie Roberts was appointed supervisor of the computer department, and she took her responsibility for the department's well-being seriously. She made it her policy to hire only women, because she felt that it created fewer distractions. In turn, it opened up opportunities for more women to be hired into the company than would have been likely otherwise, and for the young women to be mentored under her businesslike but caring watch.
Over the course of the next decade, JPL experimented with the Corporal, WAC Corporal, and Bumper WAC, all missiles of varying sizes that built on Nazi V-2 technology and used liquid propellant to travel further and higher than ever before. Launches were moved to White Sands, New Mexico, and then Cocoa Beach, Florida, as testing the powerful missiles became more of a threat to the surrounding public. Security became a greater concern, too, as the Red Scare overcame the country and the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb. Certain employees underwent scrutiny for supposed Communist ties, or, as in the case of Hsue-Shen Tsien (a founding member of JPL), were banned from the lab, put under house arrest, and eventually deported.
Need to Know: The work environment at JPL was casual as far as offices go, but only for the men. In Pasadena, they wore short sleeves and decorated their offices with racy pictures; in White Sands, they drank, gambled, and went out with women across the border in Juarez, Mexico. The women, meanwhile, were expected to maintain a well-kept and polite demeanor, avoid certain men and their offices, and watch the launches they'd worked on from California instead of on-site.
Chapter 4: Miss Guided Missile
The Corporal missile proved challenging to develop, but it was finally completed by the end of the 1950s. By then, JPL had retrained its focus on the Sergeant, an advanced missile system with a longer range and increased accuracy — in theory. Its inertial guidance system and "burning star" propulsion method were new, untested, and didn't exactly have the Army's confidence. After a number of failed tests in the early 1950s, the project was shelved.
Despite failures like this, JPL was continuing its rapid expansion. Its budget more than doubled — from $5 million to $11 million — between 1950 and 1953, and employees often worked intense twelve-hour days. Luckily, they got along well, and friendships developed among the computers as well as between departments. Somewhat counter-intuitively, a company-wide beauty pageant called the Miss Guided Missile contest demonstrated the progressive hiring policies at JPL — most science-driven companies would not have had enough female employees to participate in such a contest during the '50s. Of course, this was thanks to Macie, who also hired JPL's first African American employee, Janez Lawson, in 1952. Janez was one of only two computers sent to the IBM training school when JPL bought its first mechanical computer, the IBM 701.
JPL eventually resumed work on the Sergeant after William Pickering took over as director of the company. The completed missile used new mechanical gyroscope technology that reduced the weight of the missile and created greater accuracy in tracking and changing direction. The Sergeant was the last missile that JPL developed, but its technology was a precursor to that which would be used for space-destined rockets in the near future.
Need to Know: Women were starting to come to JPL with more advanced degrees and experience than before, but they struggled to get jobs outside the computer department. For example, Marie Crowley would have preferred to be a chemist, but that department's manager had capped their number of female employees at three.
Long hours and rushed computing sometimes led to dangerous mistakes in the industry — work was rarely double-checked before the data was used to conduct experiments, so the women had to be extremely fastidious in order to avoid disasters.
Chapter 5: Holding Back
JPL was expanding so quickly, and women with science and math degrees were so few, that Macie took chances on some young women who weren't able to keep up with the job. Others, however, should have been hired as engineers — such as Helen Chow, whose aptitude was apparent in her work and speed. For the time being, though, only Barbara received a promotion when she became Macie's second-in-command.
As JPL became dedicated to space exploration, a notorious face appeared among the staff: that of Wernher von Braun, a Nazi war criminal. He had been captured by the United States after WWII as part of Operation Paperclip, an effort to claim Nazi scientists and their work for advancing American purposes before the Soviets could capture them instead. Von Braun was generally treated with an uneasy respect, because despite his despicable past, he was considered an innovator and a genius in the field of rocket science. JPL had enlisted him to work on Project Orbiter, their satellite proposal for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) declared from July 1957 to December 1958.
The IGY was intended to be a collaboration between nations to explore the planet by studying cosmic rays, oceanography, and other environmental and cosmic phenomena. It became more of a competition between the USSR and the Untied States to launch the first successful satellite, and between the army, navy, and air force to have their satellite design chosen for funding. JPL's bid lost to the navy, but they still developed the multi-stage launching technology for Jupiter-C, a ballistic missile rocket project. Thanks in part to Helen and Marie's work, multiple launches of Jupiter-C succeeded in exiting the atmosphere. Had the module at the top contained a satellite, it would have preceded Sputnik in entering the Earth's orbit.
Need to Know: The computers didn't only crunch numbers, they made crucial contributions to JPL's projects, such as Helen's work on Jupiter-C and Marie's work on the Microlock tracking system. Barbara and the young and talented Margaret "Margie" Behrens, another computer, both on the verge of marriage, struggled with the draw of work and more education versus the expectation that they would have children and quit their jobs soon.
Chapter 6: Ninety Days and Ninety Minutes
By December 1956, JPL had performed three test launches of Jupiter-C (and renamed the project to Juno), while the navy's satellite project, Vanguard, was only testing the first stage of its rockets. Soon afterward, Juno was shut down due to funding issues. It was frustrating for everyone at JPL to have their work overlooked, even more so when the USSR launched Sputnik in October 1957. Pickering and von Braun petitioned President Eisenhower to let them launch Juno, and after they were denied, JPL made a rather facetious proposal for Project Red Socks, a rocket to the moon. Meanwhile, the first Vanguard attempt failed on the launch pad while broadcasting live on December 9, 1957.
In the wake of Vanguard's failure, JPL was finally given a chance to launch their satellite. After years of waiting, they were given only until the end of January to prepare the launch; luckily, their satellite, the Explorer, which launched on January 31, 1958, was a success. A successful Vanguard launch wouldn't take place until March 1958.
The computers were experiencing their own ups and downs, as well as new challenges in balancing work with their personal lives. In 1956, Marie Crowley took a position in the chemistry department; in 1957, she decided to leave the lab after an accident with nitric acid. Janez chose to leave the lab in order to have children, though she did return to work as a chemical engineer in the private sector a few years later. Their departures made way for Sue Finley's arrival in 1958, while Helen, who was getting married to Arthur Ling, had no intention of quitting her work.
Need to Know: The Eisenhower administration had discouraged JPL's satellite project in part because JPL fell under the army's jurisdiction, and they didn't want to give the impression that the US satellite was a weapon or a threat. The Explorer's success helped JPL transform their public persona from military scientists to rocket scientists.
Chapter 7: Moonglow
In July 1958, President Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). His wariness about letting JPL dedicate itself to space exploration lingered even after the Explorer project, so it was months before they became an official part of NASA. With space opened up to a greater degree, the scientists at JPL started dreaming of exploring Mars and Venus — the two planets thought in the 1950s to possibly harbor life.
Instead, their first assignment was to save the Air Force's unsuccessful moon probe, Pioneer. Using calculations that had been abandoned when Project Red Socks was denied, the computers and scientists at JPL managed to send Pioneer 4 past the moon and into the Sun's orbit in March 1959 — a great achievement, but it came after the Soviet Union's successful launch of Luna 1. JPL, officially tasked with crewless lunar and planetary missions as well as rocket development, decided to start developing an international tracking system; after ten years of service, Barbara visited the Mojave Desert for the first time to see the tracking system and begin planning the network.
(Continues...)
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