'Rocket Girls,' soaring tale of women who helped launch space race

After six decades in space, we’re still inclined to label satellites “man-made” spacecraft as if it were the 1950s, when people were startled by the reality of metal cylinders with names like Sputnik, Vanguard and Explorer soaring over their heads.

This “man-made” stuff needs to stop, like yesterday; not because of “political correctness” so much as factual accuracy. For as Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls (Little, Brown, 288 pp., *** ½ out of four stars) engagingly informs us, those early American satellites and the many more that followed would not have cleared paths to the stars and planets without the contributions of smart, mathematically inclined women. They may not have been astronauts, but they were groundbreaking adventurers of comparable consequence — and heroism.

Holt, author of Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV, begins this illuminating story during World War II, when the U.S. was making its first inquiries into rocket power through the auspices of a Pasadena, Calif., research facility that would become NASA’s storied Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Years before there was even a NASA, however, the main task for this burgeoning outfit wasn’t to explore space, but help wage war through experiments with missiles and high-speed aircraft. Before this technology could be tested and deployed, calculations needed to be made as to such factors as speed, direction and power.

Enter the human “computers”: A team of women, such as Barbara Canright, Macie Roberts and Sue Finley, who were among the first of many hired by the lab for their aptitude with numbers and ability to work with bulky calculators, pencils and graph paper to transform those numbers into “meaningful data.” Working so hard that “their fingers became rough with calluses from gripping a pencil eight hours a day,” these women moved from such tasks as determining how many rockets could make a plane airborne to what kind of engine was needed to propel a rocket to the edges of space.

Over time, their work would be so consequential to rocketry that some of their names would be signed on to the missiles being tested, first in the southwestern deserts and eventually to the scrubby beaches of Florida.

So forward-looking was this team that as far back as 1952, they hired an African-American chemistry graduate named Janez Lawson to join their ranks. It didn’t matter what color or creed a living computer was, as long as they could, in Macie Roberts’ words, “look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

The team grows in size and diversity as do its tools and the dimensions of its tasks. Even as not-so-human computers made by IBM join their offices, diligent, talented women such as Barbara Paulson, Helen Chow and Margie Behrens continue to use their heads and pencils to help America respond to Russia’s October, 1957, launch of Sputnik with the successful launch four months later of Explorer I.

Throughout the succeeding decades, when they work on satellites and robots that map the moon, register temperatures on Venus and photograph the surface of Mars, these women are vividly depicted at work, at play, in and out of love, raising children — and making history. What a team — and what a story!