The Calculating Stars

HISTORICAL NOTE

Shall we talk about the changes in this timeline? They begin, obviously, before the books start, with the defeat of Truman by Dewey. I did this because I needed a president in office who would be more likely to start the space program a little sooner.

This is because I had boxed myself in on timelines with the novelette “The Lady Astronaut of Mars,” to which this is a prequel. I have three other short stories in my “punchcard punk” universe, the first of which, “We Interrupt This Broadcast,” is about the asteroid strike. Being short stories, I skimmed the research and didn’t think about the fact that in 1952, we were still five years from getting anything into orbit.

As I began researching the novel, I realized that the technology existed to have launched satellites earlier if I made a couple of very small tweaks in the timeline. For instance, in the real world, when Wernher von Braun and his team were brought to the United States, they were held for a couple of years before being allowed to begin work in rocketry. During that time von Braun wrote Mars: A Technical Novel, in which he proposed a manned mission to Mars.

The novel is … technical. It has charts. It has a table of equations in the back. It demonstrates that von Braun was a brilliant scientist and was incredibly useful for research details. Did I mention the graphs?

The point being that if people had thrown money at him in 1945, von Braun had a plan to get people to Mars. So I put a president in power who would throw money at him, and then I dropped an asteroid on D.C.

For more information about the early days of rocketry, I highly recommend Amy Shira Teitel’s Breaking the Chains of Gravity, which is a look at spaceflight pre-NASA.

Most of the headlines and articles in this novel are real and are taken from The New York Times. I tweaked some of them for historical continuity, but most of them are unchanged.

One that is particularly worth pointing out is the headline about the women taking the astronaut trials. This is a thing that really happened. There were twelve to thirteen of them, depending on how you count it. They were invited to take the tests as a way of gathering data and then political machinations put a stop to it. Before it did, though, the tests were showing that the women could handle higher G-forces and tended to score higher on stress testing. Since one of the women had eight children, I rather imagine that the stress tests seemed relaxing.

Check out Promised the Moon by Stephanie Nolen. Several of the women who were in the testing scene were pilots from the real-world tests. In particular, learn more about Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb. When you do? You’ll think I modeled Nicole and Elma on them. I didn’t, when I created the characters, but once I realized the parallels, I absolutely milked it.

Speaking of Jackie Cochran … she created the WASPs and was a founding member of the 99s. Without her, women would have had an even more difficult road to becoming commercial pilots. She was a remarkable and complicated woman.

The WASPs themselves were skilled pilots, and all of the statistics I cited about them are completely true. Including the fact that the only black woman pilot to apply was asked to withdraw her application.

During this time, black air clubs and air shows were extremely popular. I make a nod to Bessie Coleman, who couldn’t get her pilot’s license in the U.S., due to discrimination laws. So she taught herself and went to Paris to get her license. For more on Miss Coleman, and other African-American aviators and astronauts, check out Black Wings by Von Hardesty.

And what about the computers? I have three books you need to read. Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt, Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, and The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel. All three of these books focus on the women mathematicians—the “computers”—who powered astronomy and rocketry. They were doing these calculations by hand, with pencil and slide rule, long before mechanical computers were a thing. Could we have gone to the moon without mechanical computers? Women were doing these calculations before the machines were around. The machines were faster—once they started working—but they couldn’t design the equations. Those were still all written by hand in the early days. Even if you’ve seen the film Hidden Figures, just go buy the book. It is exhaustive in the details of what these women actually did. Likewise, Rise of the Rocket Girls demonstrates women’s involvement at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from day one. They actually had a policy not to hire men for the computer department.

I wrote the novel in 2016, before Hidden Figures was published, and when I saw the trailer for the film I bounced around the room with delight, because these were the women I was writing about. I was also so relieved because the stickiest “willing suspension of disbelief” point with my beta readers was the inclusion of women of color in the computer department. These women were there. Helen, in fact, is very loosely based on Helen Yee Chow Ling. Ida Peaks’s career path takes some inspiration from Janez Lawson. So I was relieved when Hidden Figures came out, because it was a step toward putting these women back into the histories they were erased from.

In the 1950s a man with an advanced degree in mathematics was an engineer. A woman was a computer. There was a huge discrepancy in the pay rates for those two job titles, even though the women were the ones designing the algorithms that drove much of the space industry. Likewise, white workers were paid more for the same work. I wish that these historical battles did not still have to be fought, but neither of these two statistics has changed.

So could we have gone to the moon without mechanical computers? Maybe. Here is where I’m taking the most liberty. In the real world, most of the early LEOs (low-Earth orbits) were calculated by hand. There were vast teams of human computers working together to do the calculations required for every aspect of the space program.

Once the mechanical computers were reliable, they were faster and—more importantly—did not require the same quantity of skilled labor that the human computing departments did. The mechanical computers also allowed binary transmission of visual images. The Apollo capsules used UNIVAC to track the spacecraft and to decode the signals coming back to Earth.

Honestly, the Lady Astronaut timeline does have mechanical computers, although more limited than in the real world. Could we have gone to the moon with only a human computer? Maaaaybe. But we wouldn’t have been able to track them, and might not even have been able to communicate with them en route.

Other than that, I tried to play fair with the science in this book.

Some real-world incidents that I “borrowed” and adjusted for the book:

Mr. Wizard really was a pilot in WWII. While he never had a Lady Astronaut on, when I watched episodes of his show I was struck by the fact that the little girls did the same type of science as the boys. He didn’t gender it and treated them with intellectual respect. I extrapolated from that to come up with the Lady Astronaut episodes.

The rocket that exploded and came down on the Williams’ farm is based on Mariner 1, although in that case the range safety officer did his job and blew the rocket up. But the details about the missing hyphen caused by a transcription error are completely true. And in the real world, the fellow who made the mistake got a promotion.

Michael Collins, who was in the command module during Apollo 11 and was supposed to be on Apollo 8, had bone spurs in his neck. The process and recovery that he went through is documented in his excellent autobiography Carrying the Fire. I totally stole that and gave it to Stetson Parker.

He also tells of difficulty getting the hatch latched on a capsule after a spacewalk. I took it further, but the inspiration came from him.

Space is really amazing. We tend to focus on the astronauts, but there are thousands of people who are dedicated to the exploration of space. When I visit NASA, I’m always struck by the fact that each person I meet believes that they have the best job and that they are doing something important. And they are. Our timeline hasn’t had a disaster to push the space program into high gear, but exploring space is still important. So many aspects of your everyday life come directly from research for the space industry. Computers, satellites, GPS, cordless drills, cell phone calls … all of these things were sparked by the people at NASA and the other space programs around the world. We see the astronauts, but they are just the tip of the rocket.