Meet The ‘Rocket Girls,’ The Women Who Charted The Course To Space
In the 1940s, an elite team of mathematicians and scientists started
working on a project that would carry the U.S. into space, then onto the
moon and Mars. They would eventually become NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (or JPL), but here’s what made them so unusual: Many of the
people who charted the course to space exploration were actually women.
Nathalia Holt tells their story in her new book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. Holt tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro that the women worked as “computers.”
“In a time before the digital devices that we’re used to today, it
was humans that were doing the calculations,” she says. “And so you
needed these teams of people — many of whom were women, especially
during World War II — and they were responsible for the math.”
Barbara
Paulson was one of those women. She tells Shapiro that while her
sisters were preparing to be secretaries, she took a different path. She
says, “I had had quite a bit of math in high school. … I know my
mother certainly wanted us all to graduate from college, but why I
veered off into this … I can’t remember. … But I did, and it helped
me get the job that I did get at JPL.”
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