The public face of the Apollo program was big, strong, white, male — and American. Outside this country, Australia’s vital contribution was ignored. And for a good reason. NASA needed the support of the American people — and the vote of Congress — for money to fund the program. All publicity centred around the astronauts, chosen not just because of their intelligence, skill, courage and even temperament, but because they’d look and sound good on TV and radio.
Part of the reason we wrote To the Moon and Back was to provide an accurate story about Australia’s role in the Apollo missions, which might also stop fantasies like the movie The Dish becoming accepted as fact. Apart from Betty Clissold, who ran the canteen, there are no women in our first book — and all the faces are white. But without the women working at NASA, Apollo might never have reached the Moon — and many of those women did not have white faces.
Why were they invisible? At the very beginning of the space age, the ‘human computer’ women were vital. In 1942 during World War II — when so many men were in the defence forces — a woman called Macy Roberts was made supervisor of an extraordinary group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Macy Roberts knew that not many men would accept a female supervisor, so she decided to create an all-female group.
These women plotted the trajectories and all the other massive calculations the laboratory needed before the advent of the computers we know today. Apollo 11 operated with much less computing power than your mobile phone. But it had an incredible team of women ‘computers’ to plot its course and capabilities.
The major ‘coding network’ for the Apollo missions was created by Susan Finley. She was part of the all-female team of coders, whose work was integral to the success of the Apollo 11 mission, but which was kept from the public gaze. Finley worked on the Deep Space Network, the communication system that made the astronauts’ transmissions back to Earth possible — as well as Neil Armstrong’s famous words.
Another vital woman, Margaret Hamilton, who is mentioned earlier in the book, wrote the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) code that made the lunar landing possible.
Margaret Hamilton was the director of software engineering for the Apollo missions, and was possibly the greatest pioneer of the subject. She even invented the term ‘software engineering’ to show it was different from the ‘hardware’ of the computer itself. She began using the term during the early Apollo missions to ensure that software development was seen to be as important as physical engineering. Despite technical and engineer work being male-dominated at the time, Margaret Hamilton’s genius and determination made her an exception. She also led the team credited with developing the software for the Skylab project.
It wasn’t easy. Not only did the women have to fight anti-female prejudice every day at work but also in their personal lives, facing criticism and insults for leaving their families to go to work.
Without Margaret Hamilton, Apollo 11 would never have landed. It was her code that made the landing possible. In those terrifying three minutes, when the computer became overloaded, Margaret Hamilton was listening from MIT, where she was Director of the Software Engineering Division in the instrumentation lab. Writing about the incident later, she said, ‘A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software . . . If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.’
A few years ago, going through transcripts of those historic days, researchers came upon an unusual phrase: ‘Battle Short’. What did it mean?
The email arrived just before dinner. It seemed I was the only one who still knew what this meant. ‘Battle Short’ is an old military emergency instruction, which means ‘override all safety and fault protection and continue with the critical task at hand’.
Margaret Hamilton had given the code the capacity to operate in a ‘Battle Short’ during a critical situation.
The magnificent 2016 film Hidden Figures, based on the non-fiction book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, showed the astounding but ignored careers of the female African-American mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan.
Their work was genius — and trusted absolutely. When John Glenn was waiting to be fired into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, he insisted, ‘Get the girl, check the numbers,’ before boarding the rocket. ‘If she says they’re good, I’m good to go.’ The girl was Katherine Johnson.
The three female African-American mathematicians were known as the ‘computers in skirts’. They worked on the Redstone and Mercury programs for NASA, as well as Apollo. Once again, it was the shortage of men during World War II — and the shortage of geniuses — that led to their appointment. Because of a presidential order prohibiting racial discrimination in the defence industry, NASA’s predecessor in the 1940s, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), recruited African-Americans with college degrees for the computer pool.
At first, their jobs were routine. They read the data from the black boxes of planes as well as reading, calculating and plotting test data, rather than innovation — women were considered to be more patient and able to focus on small details than men. Then one day, Katherine and a colleague were assigned temporarily to help the all-male flight research team. Katherine’s knowledge of analytic geometry was so extraordinary, fast and detailed that, as she stated, they ‘forgot’ to return her to the pool. In that era of segregation, however, African-Americans were forced to work in a separate wing and use separate facilities. Their office was labelled ‘Colored Computers’. When Johnson worked on calculations of orbital mechanics in ‘white’ buildings, she had to run up to half a kilometre back to ‘their’ building to use the toilet — then run all the way back again.
Johnson had also been one of three African-American students, and the only female, selected to integrate at graduate school after the United States Supreme Court ruled that states providing public higher education to white students also had to provide it to black students.
Johnson experienced all the prejudice that women — and African-American women — faced at the time. But she succeeded by ignoring it, focusing on her work — and knowing it was good. If anyone objected to her presence, she told them calmly but firmly that she was working where she belonged — and was needed.
Johnson worked on the Mercury and Apollo programs. It was her work on developing a one-star observation system that allowed the astronauts on the damaged Apollo 13 mission to work out exactly where they were, so they could plot a way back to Earth. Johnson’s calculations were essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program. She also worked on plans for a mission to Mars and the Earth Resources Satellite.
On 5 May 2016, the ‘Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility’ was formally dedicated at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. West Virginia State University endows a STEM scholarship in honour of Johnson and has a life-sized statue of her on campus. On 12 May 2018, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the College of William and Mary, in Virginia.
NACA disbanded the coloured computing pool in 1958, when the organisation was superseded by NASA, which adopted digital computers. This installation was desegregated.
NASA was, in fact, far more advanced than most industries and universities in employing women and giving them the opportunity to do challenging work. Genius is rare, and NASA was not going to turn away genius, even if they wore a skirt — or had dark skin. But neither, however, would they publicise it.
It was the norm back then for men in all areas of work — from academics to chefs to artists — to take the credit for work done by their female ‘assistants’, women who were paid far less and not given recognition for their work. This happened at universities and in government departments. Until the rise of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, women accepted the status quo, grateful they had a chance to do meaningful work or, indeed, any work at all. Theirs was a society that assumed men were the ‘breadwinners’ and women were the ‘homemakers’. It is impossible to overstate the prejudice against the possibility of women in prestigious positions.
Even now, only about 23 per cent of scientists and engineers in NASA are women, although about half the students doing astronaut courses are female. Space agencies across the world are now trying to encourage girls into the industry, not hide their presence there.
The lost women of NASA are now being recognised at last, and their achievements lauded.
WOMEN IN THE AUSTRALIAN SPACE PROGRAM
In the 1960s, Australia was not as socially advanced as the United States. Married women could not be teachers, permanent public servants or even study various ‘male’ professions. The women at Honeysuckle were employed as secretaries or assistants, but not in any major role. But there was another reason why a woman with genius and perseverance still might not have broken the ‘glass ceiling’ and done more major work at Honeysuckle.
From Canberra, where the staff lived, it was an hour-and-a-half drive out to Honeysuckle along steep narrow mountain roads. The men took it in turns to drive. And they drove FAST. The only traffic coming the other way would be from the previous shift, so everyone knew when they were unlikely to meet another car head on, as they zoomed around the corners.
At the first Honeysuckle reunion, Jackie spoke to the women who had worked there. Each said they’d enjoyed it, ‘though it was a bit of a boy’s club’. But when she asked why they left, each gave exactly the same answer — that drive was terrifying and, back in the 1960s, no man would let a ‘woman driver’ (women were supposedly dangerous drivers) take the wheel.
WHY THE WOMEN STAYED INVISIBLE
When writing the first edition of To the Moon and Back, Jackie read all the reports, but could not find any written by women. The reason? Women were not permitted to put their names on reports they’d written. (This was common in many industries, and universities, where female ‘research assistants’ or even wives would do the work, but only men would appear as authors of the paper. Women who quibbled might be told that, after all, it was the male career that was important. Few women were expected to ever be promoted far enough for a ‘career’.)
Until women’s historical contributions in all areas began to get recognition in the 1980s, it was almost impossible for an outsider to know women had been there, or what vital and extraordinary work they had done. Even now, it will be a long and difficult task to discover how much pioneering work achieved by women was credited to men.