Book Review 📖

Rise of the Rocket Girls

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In a couple sentences

Rise of the Rocket Girls is the stories of several women programmers who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, from its beginnings in the 30s to present.

The arc of the book is the trajectory of the JPL, space program, and computer technology. The pieces are the women’s stories: the details of their work and calculations, their career paths and personal lives.

Who gave it to me

My mom gave me this book for my birthday. We both work in male-dominated fields (economics and computer programming), so she knows what it’s like and how good it is to hear stories of other women doing this work.

Ironically, though the space industry at large is male-dominated, the “computer” group at the JPL was very female-dominated.

How it made me feel

Awesome. I loved being able to come home from work, and no matter if I felt bad or good about my work, I was able to read more of this book and feel happy and good about the work that these women were doing.

As a person very interested in computation myself, it was also exciting to learn more about rocketry and the specific problems there — and you do learn a lot.

It’s a feel-good book.

Most surprising thing

I’d always thought how impressive it was that space engineers could launch rockets that followed such a precise trajectory and met up with their moving targets that were so far away.

I couldn’t wrap my head around the amount of foresight and brainpower that would go into those calculations. No doubt, the book sustained my awe. It’s stupidly impressive. But I did learn that early into missile development, self-guiding and stabilizing systems were put into rockets. Rockets were not just launched and put on a path, rather they could self-correct and used bright stars to orient themselves, even in the early days. This makes more sense.

Coolest moment

When I was reading the details of an ambitious mission the lab was putting up in the 70s, only to realize it was the same craft, Voyager, that had that had recently made news for leaving our solar system.