Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt (Epub)

Description

In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn’t turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible.

For the first time, Rise of the Rocket Girls tells the stories of these women — known as “human computers” — who broke the boundaries of both gender and science. Based on extensive research and interviews with all the living members of the team, Rise of the Rocket Girls offers a unique perspective on the role of women in science: both where we’ve been, and the far reaches of space to which we’re heading.

“If Hidden Figures has you itching to learn more about the women who worked in the space program, pick up Nathalia Holt’s lively, immensely readable history, Rise of the Rocket Girls.” — Entertainment Weekly

User’s Reviews

Review A New York Times bestsellerA Los Angeles Times bestsellerAn Amazon Best Book of 2016An Entertainment Weekly “10 Books You Have to Read in April”An Elle “8 Books by Women for Bill Gates to Read This Summer”Goodreads Choice Awards finalist”Illuminating…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!”―Gene Seymour, USA Today (3.5 stars/4)”The women’s stories are fun, intense, and endearing, and they give a new perspective on the rise of the space age.”―Popular Science”A marvelous book…. When Neil Armstrong made his ‘giant leap for mankind,’ there was womankind in the control room.” ―Maria Popova, Brain Pickings”Immersive, evocative…. Superbly readable…. Holt’s poignant narrative should be required reading.” ―Maya Gittelman, Bookreporter”Holt investigates the fascinating lives and important contributions of these women, who defied the sexist stereotypes of their times to play pivotal roles in sending the first rockets beyond Earth.” ―Scientific American”An intriguing account of the young, female ‘human computers’ who worked at Caltech’s JPL. Be inspired by their work on America’s first satellite and other groundbreaking projects, against the social backdrop of the Space Age, slowly changing gender norms, and the dawn of computers.”―Estelle Tang, Elle, “5 Books That You Can Read With Your Mom””Holt argues that these women’s calculations played an under-appreciated part in NASA’s towering achievements…. Here, math is dramatic, not mundane. Calculating is a physical, even athletic, act…. Holt depicts the human computers’ life stories vividly.” ―Jennifer Light, Nature”Women were obviously just as vital to innovation and progress. Rise of the Rocket Girls proves that by reexamining the space age-specifically, the group of women who redesigned rocket science in the ’40s and ’50s and made that ‘one small step for man’ possible in the first place.” ―Isabella Biedenharn, Christian Holub, Dana Getz, Entertainment Weekly”NASA’s ‘Rocket Girls’ are no longer forgotten history. Thanks to a new book, these female pioneers who helped the U.S. win the space race are finally getting their due… Holt documents the lives of these women, who were not only pioneers in their profession, but also in their personal lives.” ―Naomi Shavin, Smithsonian”A must read for any women in tech or interested in technology!”―Girls Who Code”The JPL’s earliest days were fueled by math whizzes who happened to be women…. Holt was clearly smitten while interviewing surviving members of the elite group, and conveys that affection while honoring their story.” ―Discover”Engaging…. A fresh contribution to women’s history…. Besides chronicling the development of America’s space program, Holt recounts the women’s private lives-marriages, babies, and the challenge of combining motherhood and work-gleaned from her interviewees’ vivid memories.” ―Kirkus”Holt does a fine job balancing the personal stories of these women with the technical discussions of their work ….Rise of the Rocket Girls tells a fascinating story of the women who made largely unseen yet essential contributions to the early history of spaceflight.”―Jeff Foust, The Space Review”Heartfelt…. An accessible and human-centered history…. Holt cheerfully describes the women of JPL (and JPL itself), their triumphs, and the inevitable questions about when they would marry and quit working to raise families.” ―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review”Holt’s book shines portraying the mathematical and engineering process behind JPL’s many iconic spaceflight missions…as well as the women’s personal lives and the evolution of their unusual roles inside the male-dominated workplace.” ―SPACE”Inspiring and thought-provoking, this book will change the way you look at the history of space travel–as well as its future.”―Katherine Handcock, A Mighty Girl, “25 New Mighty Girl Books for Early Spring””Incredible….Holt unveils this forgotten history with nuance and insight.”―Laurel Raymond, Think Progress”Rise of the Rocket Girls reveals the fascinating untold story of the heroic women who made America’s space program possible. We owe much to these brilliant female pioneers in science-and to Nathalia Holt for reminding us of their extraordinary contributions.”―Cate Lineberry, author of The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines “I stole sleep to finish this book and was happy to do so. I admire how Holt gives voice to a group of important (and lesser-known) female scientists who have in the past been overshadowed by their male counterparts. The domestic and the scientific are elegantly rendered–it is an impressive contribution to American history and I was sad to turn the last page.”―TaraShea Nesbit, bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos”These women helped change the course of American history. Nathalia Holt tells their remarkable story with heart and verve.”―Martha Ackmann, author of The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight”An inspiring, beautiful book. Nathalia Holt has a gift for capturing the joys and fears of scientists working at the edge of possibility. By profiling the women who learned to keep American rockets flying true, she paints the dawn of the space age with new and vivid colors.”―Jason Fagone, author of Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America”Nathalia Holt has written a gorgeously exciting book about an overlooked group of American women who deserve to have their story known. Inspiring and elegantly-told, this fresh slice of history was impossible to put down.”―Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance”This highly readable, entertaining and informative book tells the story of JPL’s ‘computers,’ the young women who did the calculations now handled by bits of silicon. Holt brings her characters to life, tracing them from their hiring as JPL began its career with the Army developing missiles for the Cold War through its conversion to NASA’s lead center for planetary exploration. She celebrates their lives, achievements, and service to the nation, as well as their excitement at having front row seats to the earliest voyages of solar system exploration. It’s a story whose telling is long overdue. We can be grateful for this enjoyable read.”―Dr. Charles Elachi, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Vice President of the California Institute of Technology, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Planetary Science”Holt gives voice to the seldom-recognized female mathematicians and scientists who shaped NASA in its earliest years and beyond.”―ALA Magazine”Non-fiction tends to be a good reading slump buster for me, and this one seems perfect.”―Andi Miller, Book Riot”Holt seamlessly blends the technical aspects of rocket science and mathematics with an engaging narrative, making for an imminently readable and well-researched work.”―Crystal Goldman, Library Journal (Starred Review, Editors’ Choice Pick)”Holt deserves credit for bringing this story to light….she is able to offer a backstage view of the bumpy start of the Space Age.”―Julia M. Klein, Boston Globe”We hope the renewed history of the rocket girls continues to inspire more girls and women to pursue STEM fields so the gender gap is sealed once and for all.”―Makers”Holt’s book shines portraying the mathematical and engineering process behind JPL’s many iconic spaceflight missions–including America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, and the Voyager probes that explored the solar system–as well as the women’s personal lives and the evolution of their unusual roles inside the male-dominated workplace.”―Space.com”Rocket science has long been associated with men…but in Rise of the Rocket Girls, Nathalia Holt shines a light on the women behind the scenes.”―Eliza Thompson, Cosmopolitan, “6 New Books to Read This Month”

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ While the STEM debate rages, Rise of the Rocket Girls shatters the American stereotype that girls can’t do numbers. Rocket Girls tells the story of California’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) from the early days (1940s) when the main goal was to strap a rocket onto a plane to make it go faster, to the present time of space exploration. In 1940, when the guys were shooting rockets out of a dry canyon in southern California, one of them just happened to be married to a girl who was good with numbers. Barbara calculated speed, trajectory, combustion, and other factors for rocket and propellant development, and she set the tone for future projects.As the work grew, and young JPL expanded, the number of women “computers” (they computed! The term predates the machines) grew. The woman who was in charge of the “computers,” Macie Roberts, hired only women for the department, because she wanted to preserve the camaraderie and team spirit so essential to this critical work. Thus, in a benevolent form of gender discrimination, JPL developed a sterling team of brilliant women. Macie often reminded the women, “In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.”As we learn about the development of rocketry, the author, Nathalia Holt, weaves in cultural developments, such as the invention of pantyhose and the rise of the women’s liberation movement. She also includes snippets from the women’s personal lives (like the fact that pregnancy meant instant termination–until the program realized it was dead without the women computers, and adapted flexibility to accommodate them).The women went from pencils and notebook paper to making history. Their calculations put the first man on the moon. Their formulas became code, and they became the first computer programmers. As Holt says, “You can write a lot of programs in five decades. The code that (the women) wrote would continue to work its way into spacecraft, navigation systems, climate studies, and Mars rovers. It would get spliced up and repurposed, pasted into different missions, sent out into space, driven on far-off planets…to (currently orbiting Mars and Saturn spacecraft)…to future Earth-orbiting instruments designed to study our own world.”If you are one of those who believes females aren’t geared toward math and science, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to read this engaging, compelling book. It will tell you of a time when women, using only their minds and pencils, rendered the complex calculations that allowed the United States of America to have a space program at all.

⭐ As a former ‘Rocket Girl’ (General Dynamics/Convair Launch Vehicle Engineering), I found this book fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable. By degree a mechanical engineer, I wrote and ran computer code (on punch cards) to determine heat loads on the rockets and their payloads. I remember the engineering challenges of correctly modeling laminar and turbulent air flows over payload cover structures and how much I enjoyed the work. It was a short career – I was tempted away by a High Temperature Gas Cooled Nuclear Reactor – but my most vivid memories will always be my first job out of college on the Atlas (work horse of the century) and Centaur launch vehicles.

⭐ I was born in 1950, a native of a beach suburb in Los Angeles County. While my Dad worked for the telephone company, everyone else on our street worked in the aerospace industry. Our neighborhood and city buzzed with each new jet or rocket. Across the basin up against the mountains I could see out my window was JPL, and science fiction became reality there.In spite of social problems, the 50s and 60s were exciting times for kids like me who dreamed of the stars.Little did I know that it was a group of underpaid and under-recognized women who were doing a big share of the work at JPL. This book is a fascinating tale of how they did it.I’m 70 now, and we just landed the most sophisticated Mars explorer ever just the other day – Perseverance – which might have been named after the grit those early pioneer female engineers showed.This book makes that clear.

⭐ Wow! Fantastic non-fiction read! In telling us the story about the women of the Jet Propulsion Lab, Holt brings us a the bonus of another angle of the rise and development of the space exploration era. This one peers at the history from outside Cape Canaveral/Kennedy, and thus provides a fuller understanding of how widespread the industry has been – there is so much more than “just” NASA.This book will appeal to a broad spectrum – men and women, older and youthful. While containing trivial memoir-style annecdotes that infuse the more technical discussions with personal interest and keep the book from getting heavy, it’s not a Chick Lit piece that would bore someone like my husband (in fact, he’s reading it now). (And don’t take my words to indicate that he’s a chauvinist, because he’s no such thing, and he loves strong female characters – just, living in a house of all women and girls, he sometimes feels that certain books or movies have “too much estrogen for me right now”. This book definitely will not do that for him.)The writing is very engaging, so no yawning over Holt’s work. Rise leaves me wanting to find recent books about the planets and their moons, and wanting to find out more from my father about his time working on the Space Shuttle programming. The only way this book could be better is if the title used “Women” instead of the diminuizing “Girls,” as these were all very much adults, and highly accomplished and respected ones at that.Oh yeah, and now I’m going to play the recordings from Voyager’s gold record while I make some minestrone soup. . . Thank you, Nathalia Holt, for one of those reads that pull your mind into its zone long after you’ve turned the last page. 🙂

⭐ I would give it 10 stars if I could. This is a FANTASTIC book – Very readable and enjoyable – I have no doubt if it were not for these ladies, we’d still be thinking the world was flat! Anyone with a student in a STEM program should get this book for them – to realize that there was life before “electronic computers”. I have purchased copies for family and recommended it to bunches of people. You will be astonished when you read it, then you’ll want to read it again.

⭐ I put this on my Amazon wish list as soon as I came across a review. I enjoyed the history–and the background about how Nathalia Holt discovered these neglected women and their part in the history of the space program. Their important–make that essential–role in research and development has been practically buried. I learned about the beginnings of JPL and NASA and was amazed to see that it all began with pencils, paper, and sliderules, These women were known as computers at the beginning, but eventually they moved on to machine computers, which weren’t a lot of help at first…It’s a good thing the women were there for backup.The author covers the 1940s through today and profiles a number of those pioneers: How they found their way to their careers–they loved math, algebra, calculus, and the sciences–despite obstacles of the times. We owe them so much! Their stories bog down a bit in the personal descriptions; some parts could have used a little editing, but that balancing act of family and work was new to women then. I found the space program history fascinating. I learned so much! This is history that needs to be covered in school.You can learn even more in the Notes, and there’s a comprehensive index. Highly recommended.

⭐ This is an impressive work focusing on the women that helped the Jet Propulsion Lab become a major facet of the US space program. Unlike some books about the trials and tribulations of women penetrating areas of the work force that were basically exclusive to men, this work is not whiny about the plight of women as they demonstrated their remarkable abilities. It is eye opening how much they contributed. It is factually oriented and not overly editorializing. Really folks, this is a solid contribution to both how the space program grew and how much women contributed to it while facing very real obstacles in the process.

⭐ I thought I knew a lot about our space program. But this book, told from the viewpoint of women I never knew existed, added significantly to what I knew of the early days of our space program. The story of the women “computers’ who did all of the mathematical computations for JPL while we were putting a man on the moon is a wonderful tribute to the technical skill of women, a frequently overlooked resource.I highly recommend this to anyone interested in our space program.I also highly recommend it to anyone who has any doubts of a woman’s ability to succeed in a Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) field.

⭐ I really enjoyed this book. I enjoy reading histories of the space program. This book covers the history of JPL from the very beginning, told through the lives of the computers, women who did the serious mathematics needed to compute trajectories, model rocket thrust, etc. These women were at the center of everything from the first successful U.S. satellite to all the space probes to the moon, Venus, Mars, and the Voyagers. But this is also a story about women’s experience in the 1940s through the 1970s. When one of the computers became pregnant, there was no maternity leave back then. They just had to quit. Some returned. Daycare was getting your mother or a neighbor to watch your child.Just an amazing story about some amazingly talented women who did amazing things.

⭐ I bought this book because I caught an interview of the author on CSPAN one day. I used to live right by JPL in California and interestingly enough, knew about some of the chemicals they used and experimented with to make their rockets. It damaged the water supply there…and we all received notices from JPL about high levels of Pechlorate still found it the water. (Suffered hypothyroidism until moving away-go figure!) I loved reading about these women and their involvement with the progress of space exploration. Great read for sure!

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