And when the machines did start to become available in the late 60s and early 70s, the women still did the majority of the most tricky math by hand, because the (male) engineers who relied on those numbers didn’t trust the machines to get it right. Sixty years ago, they were done by a selective group of women. Today, powerful machines at NASA do the complicated calculations. These female “computers” didn’t just double-check all the math - they did all the math. In the days before IBM and Microsoft and Apple, when computing power was limited in its number-crunching abilities, if a (male) engineer at JPL didn’t feel like doing the calculations for Project Vanguard’s rocket launches, he had a woman do it. These women, fondly called “ computers,” were just that. But the beauty of Holt’s narrative is that yes, we landed on the moon and we made great strides for mankind, but those strides were not all made by men - they were made by women too.ĭozens of women have worked at JPL since the 1950s, since even before it played a major role in the achievements of the American space program. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were part of Apollo 11, which landed on the moon in 1969. You might know them as the missions to the moon.
These efforts led to JPL’s partnership with NASA, which resulted in the Apollo missions. In the earliest days of the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), before it partnered with NASA, they worked on missile projectiles. Without these women and their efforts, we never would have landed a man on the moon or known what the surface of Mars looks like. I love reading about women in science, and this really hit the spot.
Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, is a refreshing and delightful read, telling the previously untold story of the many women who contributed significantly to America’s participation in the Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s.
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