Space and Rockets

Our book club is currently reading the Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt. A book I probably would not have read and even when I began reading, I kept wondering why was I reading a book that didn't interest me. As with many stories, the more I read the more I wanted to know. The story is about The Women Who Propelled us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. The author tells the story of amazing women who exceeded and loved numbers. The women were called computers and they helped chart travel into space as they worked beside men who sometimes weren't kind to them. If the women was young and single, the first thing against them was "that they would get married and pregnant and their training would go to waste."

Even though there is technical stuff in the book, it is written and flows as a fiction novel. A lot of what was happening, I remember. Though at the time I wasn't interested in knowing what NASA was doing. I doubted that a man had landed on the moon after I overheard  my Mother say, "How do we know it is true that a man landed on the moon? In this day and age they can do all sorts of things with cameras in Hollywood." I do remember watching the landing on the moon on television thinking, is such a thing possible?

It amazes me at how smart these women had to be in order to do number equations to get a rocket up in the sky and to figure it all on paper with pencils. I marveled at how they were able to handle a demanding job and also get married and have a family. The forty-nine photographs in the book interested me; more now than then. The rings round Saturn are beautiful and Jupiter looks like a futuristic painting.

A friend told me that the movie, Hidden Figures, was about women who worked in the Space Program. Today I went to see the movie and it is about gifted women working with numbers, yet it is also how they had to put up with segregation. The movie features the story of three women: Dorothy Vaughn
who becomes the first supervisor in computers; Mary Jackson, first NASA engineer; and Kathleen Goble Johnson, a physicist and mathematician that co-workers, all men, relied on her to come up with answers.

Movie or book, I could see that women had it difficult in the workplace but they were able to overcome prejudice, discrimination and biases to help the United States get into space. In both the book and the movie, the women are dressed up, wear heels and hair is neatly combed. In a picture taken in 2013 all the women are in slacks and are wearing sneakers, well, all except one. How times change!

My suggestion is to read the book and see the movie; you won't be disappointed.

"In this job you need to look like a girl,

act like a lady, think like a man,

and work like a dog."

Macie Roberts in Rise of the Rocket Girls