Beverly Frazier told Delphi Study Club members of the Rocket Girls, an elite group of young women at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory whose work influenced military rocket design and ushered in a new era of space exploration.Speaking at the club’s October meeting, Frazier concentrated on Barbara Canright, one of the women discussed in Nathalia Holt’s book Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. Canright was the first woman recruited by JPL.Working as a 19-year-old typist at CalTech, she was familiar with the “Suicide Squad,” three young men experimenting there with rockets. With a grant to invest in rocket research, the three men formed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1939 and invited Canright and her engineer husband to join them. Canright had taken science and math classes and was attending Occidental College, graduating in 1940. JPL later partnered with NASA.Canright helped recruit other women, nicknamed “Rocket Girls” and “human computers.” Since universities of the time often did not allow women to enroll in math classes, most of the JPL women simply had an interest in math. Canright was unusual in that she held a degree in mathematics. Along with three other women, she was responsible for calculating the potential of rocket propellants. She recalled famed physicist Richard Feymann standing behind her, watching her every move as she calculated and graphed the course of a satellite.Before the advent of electronic computers, the Rocket Girls used pencil and paper to make the complex calculations needed for experimental launchings and for analyzing the failures. Working conditions were poor in the JPL, which was located in an isolated area near Pasadena, California, but the women never complained. They worked 14 to 16 hours per day and their hands would be raw from holding the pencils. The right personality was necessary to work together.When electronic computers first came into use, many engineers did not trust them and relied upon the women’s handwritten calculations to check the results. Many of the Rocket Girls were among the first computer programmers. Canright was critical in the development of the JPL program and laid the foundations for other women to work in a field previously closed to them.
