A Legacy in Stardust
The incredible story of the women who formed the backbone of every single Apollo mission, every Space Shuttle launch, every satellite, and every probe launched into the yonder from the dawn of our space-age dreams to the present day.
Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls poked at the explorer deep inside me, filled me with wonder, and awakened my inner feminist with a roar.
Holt chronicles the women who worked on the rocket-in-space problem from the inception of the Jet Propulsion Lab starting in the late 1930s up to present-day NASA. Hidden Figures, a movie about Black women in the Apollo program, is part of this larger story of women at NASA. These incredible women formed the backbone of every single early-space mission, every Space Shuttle launch, every satellite, and every probe that has gone into the yonder from the dawn of our space-age dreams to the present day. These women were human computers before the age of machine computing. They were engineers in everything but title, because engineering, after all, was not women’s work. They were visionaries, imagining every challenge and calculating solutions for every variable and worst-case scenario that could befall the expensive equipment. They were also stewards of the men, and eventually the women, riding to everlasting glory inside. They celebrated the wins with pride and grieved the losses with tears.
“Their legacy stretches into the unknown. ”
Macie Roberts and Helen Ling, both supervisors of the group, hired only women. This, in an era, where women occupied around 30% of the workforce. And more amazing, Ling made it a priority to also re-hire women who had left to start their families. Not surprisingly, NASA didn’t have a family leave policy early on. As the age of computers dawned, the women’s roles changed with the technology. Instead of calculating by hand, these women coded the programs that calculated space trajectories. When the computers were fully able to take over the data plotting task during the 1970s, these women continued, creating additional applications, marketing animations, and command and sequencing software.
How is it possible that I hadn’t heard of these women until recently? It’s certainly not for a personal lack of curiosity and interest in space. I grew up in a family of pilots, plane enthusiasts, and space program groupies. My brother had aspirations to be an astronaut, going to SpaceCamp in Huntsville, Alabama not once, but twice, when we were children. I cried when The Challenger exploded with a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, inside. I’ll never forget that day in Mrs. Bickerstaff’s class. I endured a grueling family vacation in Florida, hitting up Cape Canaveral and watching the space shuttle’s crawler transport inch towards the launch pad. That was a wondrous experience. My sixteen-year-old self would never admit it openly, so let’s keep that between us. Granted, mine is a lay person's interest in space, but it’s disappointing to think that a young girl with a burgeoning interest in the universe beyond our atmosphere did not learn about THESE WOMEN in the U.S. space program.
That frustrated me and frankly, it made me angry.
I, for one, was in dire need of female role models in STEM as a school-aged girl of the eighties. It’s entirely possible that even with female role models in math, engineering, and astrophysics, I would have traveled my original trajectory towards something right-brained. But, what if? What if experience or a book or a special teacher could have opened up my eyes to science and math as exciting paths available for exploration? What if I was inspired to understand that science provided an equally viable toolkit for answering my many questions? I wish someone would have impressed on me that the arts and science are cut from the same cloth. Scientific and the creative pursuits are both seeded by a curiosity to understand and translate the world around us.
I’m reminded of something Michelle Obama often talks about, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Experienced daily by people of color, this sentiment rings true for many women as well. I’ve heard it said, as a veiled compliment, that these women were exceptional, that they were before their time. But, women have always been there, as capable and exceptional as ever. It’s more appropriate to say that they were before men’s time.
I’m struck by how invested these women were in each other, and in the larger team, and in their mission. It begs the question… would NASA have gotten as far without their diverse workforce (even if the reason for the diversity was born out of work that was seen as lowly by their white, male counterparts)? Study after study shows that organizations that employ diverse teams of people get better business results. Every single person brings a unique outlook, history, and frame of reference which are put to good work in a collaborative environment. I’m inclined to believe that this diversity of workforce is what made the U.S. space program so successful.
Lest you think this is only a story about women, it is also a broader story about how sending humans and human-made objects into space speaks to our fundamental human need to push the boundaries. Metaphorically pushing boundaries in our understanding of the bigger picture. Literally pushing the edges of our atmosphere's thin blue line. I was struck at how emotional it all made me. I anthropomorphized Voyager 1 as it turned back towards Earth, sending off a final snapshot of its home, before pushing towards interstellar space. Voyager I and II had phonograph records—veritable time capsules—records of human existence that could, incredibly, introduce us to an alien race millennia in the future. Humankind will be long gone, but Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, brainwaves of someone thinking about what it’s like to fall in love, hello in 55 languages, the call of whales, and our location in the universe (using elemental physics) will bring us back to life. Which leads me to our other great human biological imperative, to connect. The jaded and cynical amongst us might chafe and ask, why did we spend so much money, why did we allocate so much time to create these records, why even worry about what’s beyond our galaxy in interstellar space in the first place? Because it’s part of the human condition to connect. Connect with each other, and connect across the universe.
I love the Voyager missions for their sheer audacity, the hopeful, optimistic outlook, the vision. Those little woman-made probes have been traveling through space for over four decades years and are still trucking.
“It is traveling farther than any other man-made object ever has. But it wasn’t just made by men.”
I’m glad I know about these women now, too. It makes me incredibly proud to think that their legacies continue their journeys through the stardust. Learning about Macie, Helen and their team rekindled an old flame burning inside me. A question: What else is out there? For me? For us?
