While the engineers remained wary of the 1620, many still believing that computer programming was beneath them, the women quickly realized how valuable the machine was to calculations—a lesson that wasn’t always learned easily. In the summer of 1962, while working long hours on the first missions to the moon and planets, for instance, they launched an un-crewed spacecraft toward Venus that started traveling wildly off course only minutes after the launch. With fear that the rocket might crash in a residential neighborhood, a safety officer made the decision to self-destruct the rocket. As upsetting as it was to see their work strewn across the Florida coast, it was even more disturbing to learn that the mistake could be traced to a single transcription error: A superscript bar accidentally had been left off when the handwritten guidance program was transcribed in Florida. That one mistake had spelled disaster and gave the women new respect for computers’ promise of accuracy.

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Around that time, Sue Finley, one of the women computers at JPL, was fresh from her training in a new computer language, FORTRAN, designed to translate mathematic equations into code, when a male engineer told her, “Your jobs will be gone soon.” His intimidating words reflecting a rising fear of technology in the 1960s. The threat of machines could be seen firsthand among those that worked at the telephone switchboard. With the advent of automated operations, the number of switchboard operators fell 43 percent between 1947 and 1960. It was enough to make anyone working with computers nervous.

When I first learned about the early women computers at JPL, I assumed their work would follow a similar trajectory to those at other NASA centers, characterized by short careers, and with but a peripheral involvement in the science they performed. Yet while the technology kept evolving, these women remained constant. The more things changed, the more their expertise was needed to bridge the gap between a revolving door of digital computers, each more sophisticated than the last, and our exploration of space.

On August 27, 1962, the JPL launched Mariner 2, a second attempt at sending a spacecraft towards Venus. The women watched in the control room as the ship escaped Earth’s atmosphere and made its way to the neighboring planet, following a trajectory they had designed with both pencil and paper and their favorite digital computer, Cora. Four months later, the ship passed Venus, revealing the planet’s hot atmosphere, roughly 900-degrees Fahrenheit. It was, of course, just the beginning. Next, the women would help send the first lunar spacecraft, paving the way for Apollo. When man walked on the moon in 1969, it was, in part, thanks to the calculations of women.

Their relationship with technology continues to today. It developed as the group of women used early computer animation to guide the Voyagers through the solar system in 1977, marveled over their first laptops in the mid-1980s that weighed a mere 13 pounds, and in the late 1990s, wrote programs in C and C++ to send off the first Mars rovers, one of which, Mars Opportunity, still roams the red planet.