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Science / Space Race

[August 29, 1963] Why we fly (August Space Round-up)

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by Gideon Marcus

We've become a bit spoiled of late, what with space spectaculars occurring on a fairly regular basis.  So, I was not too surprised when a friend buttonholed me the other day and exclaimed, "When is the Space Race gonna get interesting again?"  After all, it's been a whole two months since the Vostok missions, three since the last Mercury mission, and even satellite launches have been few lately.

Oh ye of little faith.  The real work doesn't happen when the rockets go up, but after their payloads are aloft.  A lot happened in the arena of space this month — you just have to dig a little to learn about it.  Here are the exciting tidbits I gleaned (and the journos missed) in NASA's recent bulletins and broadcasts:

Bridging the Continents

Communication satellites continue to make our world a smaller place.  Syncom, built by Hughes and launched by NASA late last month, is the first comsat to have a 24-hour orbit.  From our perspective on the Earth's surface, it appears to do figure eights around one spot in the sky rather than circling the Earth.  This means Syncom can be a permanent relay station between the hemispheres.

It's already being used.  On August 4 the satellite allowed Nigerian journalists and folks from two U.S. services to exchange news stories as well as pictures of President Kennedy and Nigerian Governor General Dr. Nnamdi Zikiwe.  Five days later, voice and teletype was exchanged between Paso Robles, California and Lagos, Nigeria.  This 7,700 mile conversation represents the longest range real-time communication ever made.

And, on the 23rd, Syncom carried its first live telephone conversation — between President Kennedy and Nigerian Prime Minister Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa, as well as several other official conversations.  One has to wonder if the whole scheme wasn't hatched just so Jack could expand his pen pal list to West Africa…

More comsat news: RCA's Relay 1 is still alive and kicking, having been used in 930 wideband experiments, 409 narrowband transmissions, and 95 demos of TV and narrowband broadcasts.  And in a stunning imitation of Lazarus, AT&T's Telstar 2 came back on-line after having been silent since July 16.  I understand there will be an unprecedented experiment next month: NASA is going to use Relay and Syncom to bounce a message from Brazil to Africa.  Expect that kind of satellite ping-pong to become common in the future.

Finally, NASA's passive comsat, Echo 1, continues to be used for tests.  Come winter, it will be joined by Echo 2.  Because if there's anything space needs, it's more balloons.


First pass of Echo 1 satellite over the Goldstone

Predicting the Weather

Mariner 2, the Venus probe that encountered the Planet of Love last December, went silent early this year.  Yet its reams of data are still yielding discoveries.  During the spacecraft's long flight toward the sun, it took continuous measurements of the solar wind — that endless stream of charged particles cast off from the roiling fusion reactor of our nearest star.  These measurements were then compared to readings made on Earth and in orbit.  Scientists have now determined that the sun's radioactive breeze blows in gusts from 500 to 1350 kilometers per second, the bursts correlated with expansions in the solar corona.  When a particularly strong stream of electrons and protons, sizzling at a temperature of 500,000 degrees F., slams into the Earth's magnetic field, it causes disruptions in broadcasts and communications.

Closer to home, Explorer 12 soared far from Earth in its highly eccentric orbit, charting long-lived solar plasma streams in interplanetary space.  The satellite determined that these gouts of plasma caused geophysical disturbances more than twenty days after their creation.

One can imagine a constellation of satellites being deployed to provide solar system-wide space weather reports.  Not only would they help keep astronauts safe as they journeyed from planet to planet, but they'd also let radio operators on Earth know when to expect static in their broadcasts.

And speaking of weather forecasts, Tiros 6 and 7 continue to be our eyes in the sky, tirelessly shooting TV of Earth's weather.  They've already tracked the first hurricane of the season, Arlene.  Who knows how many lives and dollars they will save with their early warnings?

Previews of Coming Attractions

The ill-starred lunar probe, Ranger, has failed in all five of its missions.  In fact, NASA is 0 for 8 when it comes to moon shots since 1959.  Perhaps Ranger 6, set for launch around Thanksgiving, will break this losing streak.  It will be the first of the Block 3 Rangers, lacking the sky science experiments that flew on Rangers 1 and 2, and the big seismic impactors carried on Rangers 3-5.  The new Rangers will just shoot TV pictures of potential Apollo landing sites.  This sacrifice of science in deference to the human mission has not gone without protest, but given the dismal track record of the program, the labcoat crowd will have to take what they can get.

A full year after Ranger (hopefully) reaches the Moon, a pair of Mariners will set sail for Mars.  Unlike last year's Mariner 2, Mariners 3 and 4 will carry cameras to provide our first close-up view of the Red Planet.  Let's just hope neither of these upcoming probes meet the same fate as Russia's Mars 1, which died last March.

At some point in the mid-60s, even bigger Mariners will fly to the planets, carried by the big liquid oxygen "Centaur" second-stage.  The first successful test fire took place on August 17 just down the way from my house — at General Dynamics/Astronautics San Diego

And finally, another 271 space candidates applied to NASA this year.  They have been screened to 30, and out of them, 10-15 will be selected in late October to comprise the third group of astronauts.  None of them are women yet, but perhaps there will be some in time for Group Four.


Pilots Jerrie Cobb and Jane Hart testify before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, July 1962.  That's an Atlas Centaur model next to them.

Who knows?  Maybe you'll be one of them!

[Want to talk to the Journey crew and fellow fans in real-time?  Come join us at Portal 55! (Ed.)]

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Science / Space Race

[Aug. 14, 1963] Engineers at Play (Spacewars!, hacking, and the PDP-1)

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[Want to talk to the Journey crew and fellow fans?  Come join us at Portal 55! (Ed.)]


by Ida Moya

A War in Space, in the Computer

Last month the traveler reviewed the August 1963 issue of Galaxy magazine. His assessment of this issue was that it contained standout stories by lesser authors, and lesser stories by standout authors. But one thing our intrepid traveler did not mention was Frederik Pohl’s editorial about his visit to M.I.T.’s computer section to play a game called Spacewar! on one of their computers.

Why is that a big deal?  Because Spacewar! is one of the very first "computer games," and possibly the very first not based on an existing game (Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess, Tennis, etc.)


Editor Frederik Pohl’s editorial about Spacewar. Note too the ubiquitous advertisement for the Rosicrucians. I wonder what that is all about?

Pohl waxes poetic, imagining himself to be the Fenachrone while his opponent is Dick Seaton. He used a simple handheld control to fly spaceships programmed in the computer to accelerate, steer, and shoot torpedoes at one another across a cathode-screen readout. I had to look it up – those characters are from the Skylark of Space series, a work by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., originally serialized in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in the 1930s.

Pohl doesn’t tell us what kind of computer he saw Spacewar being played on, nor does he name the people responsible for programming the computer to play such an active and compelling game. But I can take a guess from what I have seen about computing – it is a PDP-1, a Programmed Data Processor-1, made by Digital Equipment Corporation.

A new way to use the Computer

These young men at M.I.T. are a different generation from the buttoned-down physicists and computer scientists I work with here at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The computer users here in the Theoretical Physics or “T” division tend to be very serious about their computing, and there is no time for frivolous use of these expensive machines. The IBM 7090 and other equipment we have is carefully guarded, and has no time for games.


The TX-0 computer at M.I.T. (Image courtesy Computer History Museum)

From what I hear, these fellows at M.I.T. are a bunch of unwashed boys who emerged from the model railroad club to play with this spare computer called a TX-0. This TX-0 is a transistorized version of another one-off military computer called Whirlwind, also developed at M.I.T. These young men are not doing anything like serious physics or science, but are rather doing these useless but extremely clever things like making programs that convert Arabic numerals to Roman numerals in as few steps as possible. These kids could only get time on the TX-0 in the middle of the night, when other people aren’t using the valuable computer time, so they have very undisciplined habits and working hours. I hear that they call what they are doing “hacking.”


Brochure for Friden Flexowriter (Image courtesy Living Computers: Museum + Labs)

One interesting thing about this “hacking” and the computers they use is that, instead of using punched cards, like the batch processing we do on our IBM Stretch, they use a Friden Flexowriter, an unwieldy sort of teletypewriter, to make punched paper tapes of programs that they then directly feed into the computer. The hackers have direct access to the computer, and can fix programs themselves, rather than having to give their card deck to an operator, and hope that the results come out. That is what Pohl is talking about in his article when he says “…add another tape.”


The PDP-1 at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

A couple of year ago, in 1961, one of the designers of the TX-0, Ken Olsen, founded a company he calls Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC donated PDP-1 serial number 1 to M.I.T’s Research Lab for Electronics, and these hackers have been playing with it ever since. One of these young men, with the unlikely moniker “Slug” Russell, is a big fan of science fiction, including the swashbuckling works of E.E. Smith. He and his friends designed this “computer game,” presented on the 19-inch DEC Type 30 display. The game includes a lot of realistic physics in the movement of the spaceships, and a background star field based on a real star map. They must have a lot of time on their hands.

The leader of “T” division here at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Roger Lazarus, is suspicious of these small “time-sharing” computers like the PDP-1. He would rather invest in larger computers where all the power is used for calculating our nuclear tests, rather than sharing the power across a number of users. So we have not gotten our own PDP-1 at LASL. However, our sister institution, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (once the University of California radiation Laboratory at Livermore), received a PDP-1 in 1961.

Cecilia Larsen and the PDP-1


Cecilia Larsen, center, working on the PDP-1 at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

Cecilia Larsen, my colleague at LRL, has told me all about working with this PDP-1.

Cecilia has an interesting story of how she got into computing. She is a native of Livermore, California, where her Portugese immigrant parents owned a small general store. She received her B.A. from Dominican College in San Rafael with a full scholarship, and then went on to UC Berkeley where she achieved an MA in history, a general secondary teaching certificate, and a Technical Writing certificate. She also got a certificate in Music from the University of San Francisco. Cecilia’s husband died in 1943, so she held many jobs to support her 2 children and widowed mother.

A dozen years ago, in 1951, Cecilia saw an advertisement for a “Girl Friday” at what turned out to be the start up of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. She works with Ernest Lawrence himself, as well as lab manager Sid Fernbach and that wicked Edward Teller. Did you know that Dr. Teller made Oppie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lose his security clearance? Over what, some crazy accusation that this great man was a communist? What a terrible thing. At any rate, this California laboratory was set up to provide competition to the nuclear weapon design we are doing at Los Alamos, and sometimes we have strong feelings about what they are doing out there.

Cecilia and asked for more training to become oriented toward the work of the lab, so she was placed in an internship at the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. There she learned about the organization by working in several departments, including the Tool and Machine Shop. She later also helped set up the Laboratory’s Technical Information Department, a library of all of the classified documents that Dr. Teller and his team needed to use. Sounds so like what Charlotte Serber did at Los Alamos library!


Univac computer, showing various peripherals including a Unityper.(Image courtesy Computer History Museum)

Cecilia also got to travel to Philadelphia with the engineers to learn how to use their very first computer, the Univac LARC. The LARC came out before the IBM Stretch, but after the IBM 7090. Back at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Cecilia led the team of women that created the magnetic data tapes for the Univac on this cumbersome machine called a Unityper. Since your typing directly went onto magnetic tape, the work absolutely had to be correct, or you would have to start over. They would have two tapes made by different gals, and then compare them to see if they were the same. And they better be the same, or else. What a crazy system.

When the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore got their PDP-1 it probably came with Spacewar! in memory. I hear that the engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation do that to test whether the computer was working once it is turned on at its new location. Since the Laboratory is a secure site, used to model nuclear tests, they aren’t too likely to have a lot of computer game play going on, or a lot of outright “hackers” like university computer sites are breeding.

All the young engineers depend on Cecilia at the Laboratory. She always remembers everything, she knows where everything is, and she is unflappable. She never loses her temper, and that is very important to all of the young guys who don’t know what they are doing there. Cecilia tells me that she didn’t see much play when she works during the day, but perhaps the younger and more audacious computer users pull out the paper tapes in the evenings when the administrators go home.

In any event, it makes sense, corresponding with all the other upheavals in our society today, that there is a new generation of computer experts coming of age who are very different from the buttoned-down white-shirt-and-tie fellows we see from IBM.  Who knows what they'll come up with next!


Spacewar! in action

(By the way, though there are currently few places you can play the world's first computer game, given my contacts, I think I can help you sneak in for a session or two.  Just head over here.  Tell them Ida sent you…)




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Science / Space Race

[July 4, 1963] Down Under to the Worlds of Men (Woomera, Part 2)

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by Ida Moya

There’s been some great (and terrible) science fiction writing in the journey last month. I so appreciate these reviews, which help me find interesting things to read, and bring me up to date on the preoccupations of science fiction authors. The illustrations from the magazines that The Traveler includes are so compelling in style and subject matter. I think that they are an under-appreciated art form that, perhaps, sometime in the future, could become appreciated and highly collectible.

A few months ago I wrote about my friend Mary Whitehead, who works as an Experimental Officer in Australia. She recently wrote me back with some corrections, that I will pass on to you, in order not to mar the historical record.

For example, I said that Mary lived at Woomera, which was not the case. I was conflating the rocket testing range with the place where most of the computing work got done. She actually lives near the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE), which is located in Salisbury, a small town about 15 miles north of the big city of Adelaide. Woomera Rocket Range is in the isolated outback another 300 miles north of that.

In 1949, Mary, who studied mathematics in college, got a job in the Bomb Ballistics Section of the WRE. At that time, Mary was the only professional woman at Salisbury. Her first work was to lead a team of female Computers. At first, they used mechanical calculators like the noisy Friden’s and then Marchant’s like we used at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.


Bomb Ballistics Group Computer Judith Ellis recording data with pencil and paper from film, in 1949. (Courtesy of Defense Science and Technology Group)

In 1956 British company Elliott Brothers developed a custom-designed digital computer called WREDAC (Weapons Research Establishment Digital Automatic Computer) for WRE; one of but four digital computers in Australia at that time. This was a very sophisticated vacuum tube machine, a one off made a few years later than the ENIAC-style MANIAC we used at Los Alamos. In 1960 the WRE acquired the modular, somewhat mass-produced IBM 7090 mainframe computer, which is so valuable that they run it constantly, in three shifts.

Mary and some of her crew do go every once in a while to stay for a week at Woomera Village, next to the test range. She insisted that the Computers be able to observe the actual launches of rockets and missiles, and be trained in the operation of the data collection equipment — kinetheodolites, high-speed cine-cameras, radars, radio missile tracking systems, Doppler and telemetry reception equipment — in order to better interpret the results when they get back to Salisbury.


Two Computers wearing their army gear operate a kinetheodolite at Woomera around 1949.

Early on, it was quite a battle with the Range Superintendent to get her team to Woomera. He was concerned that it was an unsuitable and morally dangerous place for unattached young women. The compromise was that the women wear army gear – hat, khaki shirt and slacks, heavy brogues and leather jerkins for cold weather.


A team of computers visiting Woomera in 1950, wearing the army dress required by the Range Superintendent. Experimental Officer Mary Whitehead, Chaperone for the group, is second from the left. (Courtesy of Defense Science and Technology Group)

Back then, Woomera also did not have facilities for women, so they returned early from the range to have their showers from 4 to 5, before the men returned. The female Calculators also ate in the Officer’s Mess, so that they did not have to consort with the rougher men in the Other Ranks Mess. Today, though, the women working at Woomera have their own hostel and mess and no longer have to wear that army gear.

One part of Woomera range is a row of carefully calibrated cameras that take a series of photographs of a test launch. Her team also calibrates the cameras, which involves taking photographs of the starfield and getting the framing exactly right; a project that can take several weeks. Once calibrated, the tests commence and the launch photographs go back to the analysts, who use an overhead projector and other specialized equipment to translate each piece of film into location and time data. It’s really an amazingly detailed process involving a lot of cooperation. Now, what once took her team 4 weeks to calculate using Marchants, can be done in just a day on the IBM.


Long range Baker-Nunn camera for tracking satellites and photographing rockets, Woomera

Another mistake in my article that Mary pointed out to me was that she had never visited Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. When she visited America, she went to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to get a better star catalogue. She also went to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, and then the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Washington State, where she consulted with some men who had devised the mathematics for using stars as background markers for measuring the trajectories. Mary also went to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which must be where we met. She didn’t get to observe any missile tests at White Sands, but spoke with a man there who studies the refraction of light.

The project Mary is working on now is called Black Knight. It is a research ballistic missile, a test vehicle being used to get data to better design and build missiles, develop launch techniques, and learn how to handle such a big item. Mary’s group examines the Black Knight’s trajectory and re-entry into the atmosphere. So it’s important to get those measurements right, so these ballistic missiles can be better designed.


Blue Streak, one of many missiles tested at the Range, on its launcher at Lake Hart, Woomera, 1963

Mary, like me, is working for her government. In Australia and Britain, like the United States, there are careful bureaucracies that establish titles and pay rates. As a female Experimental Officer, Mary is paid the standard women’s rate of two-thirds of the male wage. Most of Mary’s female Computers are right out of school, and are expected to stay for only a few years, until they are married, when it is mandatory that they retire. Miss Mary Whitehead is not married, perhaps because of this system. Mary has even joined the Professional Officer’s Association to try to lobby for equal pay for equal work, but she is frustrated because the rest of the members are men so they don’t think too much of her appeals. Right now she trains new recruits, who start at the men’s base pay, which is more than she makes as an experienced officer. This Programmed Inequality that includes discarding of skilled Calculators and discouraging of skilled female technical workers is a great loss to the accuracy of this trajectory work in particular, and the development of computing technology in Australia and the United Kingdom in general.

I won’t tell you yet how much I make, but I too am stuck in a similarly unfair and enraging bureaucratic system. But, like me, Mary finds the work and constant learning so stimulating that it is almost worth it. Fortunately, the national push for equal rights among the races and sexes is beginning to change this awful standard. The 1960s is opening with turbulence; some people agitating for change, while other forces oppose this change, as the Traveler keeps pointing out. It’s a confusing time and hard to know what is real anymore. Perhaps a little science fiction and fantasy will ease this pain, and give us some insight into the potentials that we can build into our tomorrows.




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Science / Space Race

[June 24, 1963] First Ladies (July 1963 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

The most inspiring news this month, at least for anyone interested in humanity's first tiny steps away from our home planet, was the fact that Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova became the first woman in space.  She orbited the Earth forty-eight times aboard Vostok 6, landing safely after nearly three days inside the tiny spacecraft.

This was certainly a welcome distraction from the continuing battle in the United States over civil rights.  On June 11, Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block desegregation of the school.  Only after the National Guard arrived to remove Wallace did he step aside.

The next day, in Jackson, Mississippi, NAACP activist Medgar Evers was murdered, shot to death in his driveway.

The same day, President Kennedy addressed the nation on the subject of civil rights.

It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.

Let us hope that all Americans take these words to heart.

Those of us wishing to escape from this distressing conflict can go out to a movie theater and spend four hours watching Cleopatra, said to be the most expensive film ever made.

We can also enjoy the novelty of listening to Japanese crooner Kyu Sakamoto singing Ue o Muite Arukou (I look up as I walk).  Despite having been given the inappropriate English title Sukiyaki, this lovely, gently melancholy tune has reached number one on the US music charts.

And in the vein of literary distractions, one can do worse than a science fiction magazine.  Given Tereshkova's recent achievement, it's appropriate that the latest issue of Fantastic features a pair of firsts from women.

Artist Jacquelyn Blair, who has previously done interior illustrations for editor Cele Goldsmith's magazines, provides the cover art.  Not only is this the first time she has moved from the inside.  This is also the first time she has received credit under her full name.  Earlier issues simply listed her as Blair.  This seems to be standard practice for interior artists, so I don't think it was an attempt to hide her sex. 

Blair is not the first woman in her field.  Perhaps the most famous female illustrator of fantastic fiction is Margaret Brundage, who provided many covers for Weird Tales.  In any case, Blair's cartoonish cover properly matches the mood of the magazine's lead story…

The Trouble with Tweenity, by Jack Sharkey

A scientist discovers that an infinite number of worlds exist between normal matter and antimatter.  To solve the near future's extreme traffic congestion, the President of the United States uses devices that allow people to travel to these worlds.  All sorts of problems result.  Attempts to solve these dilemmas lead to further complications.

Typical for the author, this is a silly farce.  The science is complete nonsense, even for a comedy.  Much of the story is pure exposition.  One or two jokes provide mild amusement.  Two stars.

He That Hath Wings, by Edmond Hamilton

This month's reprint comes from the July 1938 issue of Weird Tales.  A baby is born to a woman who dies in childbirth.  She and the infant's father, already dead, were exposed to radiation in an electrical explosion.  The child has hollow bones and special muscles to control the wings he develops.  He grows into a man who can fly.  He falls in love with a woman who returns his affection, but cannot allow herself to marry someone the world thinks of as a freak.  The man must choose between flight and romance.  Sacrifice and tragedy follow.

Although this story begins in the old-fashioned style of pulp fiction, it soon becomes poetic.  The author's descriptions of the joy of flying are particularly effective.  A minor quibble is that the scientific explanation for the man's mutation is not convincing.  This emotionally powerful tale would have been even better as pure fantasy.  Four stars.

A Hoax in Time (Part 2 of 3), by Keith Laumer

In the first part of this serial, our three protagonists – a wealthy idler, a carnival performer, and a robot in the form of a beautiful young woman, created by a super-computer – wound up in the remote past.  The idler and the robot escaped.  In this installment, they return to rescue the performer, only to find that thirty years have gone by.  While waiting for the others, he helped the savage people of the past progress into healthy, self-reliant individuals.  When the three go back to their own time, they find that his efforts have changed the present.  In particular, the super-computer no longer exists, leaving them unable to journey through time again and put things back the way they were.

This part of the novel is less comic than the first.  It also has less action and more talk.  The author creates an interesting alternate version of reality.  Although the world he depicts has its flaws, it seems intended as a functioning libertarian society.  The author's philosophy also comes through in the final section of this installment, when the idler goes through an intense training program of self-discipline in order to become a valuable member of his new home.  The story is never boring, even when it becomes nothing more than a discussion of ideas.  The performer's ability to bring technology to the prehistoric people, in the manner of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, strains credibility.  Three stars.

The Recurrent Suitor, by Ron Goulart

This is a sequel to last month's story Plumrose.  The narrator, a man of 1961, is still stuck in 1897.  The occult detective Plumrose brought him there with a time ray.  He serves as the detective's reluctant assistant until Plumrose can repair the time ray.  In this story, the mismatched pair help a young man rescue his fiancée from a family curse.  As with the previous story, this is a light comedy, poking fun at old-fashioned Gothic fiction.  Three stars.

A Contract in Karasthan, by Phyllis MacLennan

This is the first published story by the author, and one hopes that it will not be the last.  A man journeys around the world in search of the magical place for which he yearns.  When he finds it, he must decide whether to remain or return to mundane reality.  This is a delicate, moody, dream-like fantasy.  It has the flavor of a myth.  The author's elegant style casts a spell over the reader.  Five stars.

Final Audit, by Thomas M. Disch

In the Nineteenth Century, a clerk has a peculiar form of precognition.  Although he fills out a book of postal expenses one month after the actual transactions, he can see one month ahead.  In other words, he knows what he is going to write in the book one month in the future, dealing with the expenses made on the day he sees them.  This strange ability seems useless, since it deals with such trivial matters.  Over many years, the clerk tries various ways to turn this to his advantage, without luck.

This is an unusual story, written in a deliberately old-fashioned style.  Although it is not a comedy, one can't help feeling that the author has his tongue firmly in his cheek.  Although the ending is predictable, the portrait of a life wasted in pursuit of an impossible goal is effective.  Three stars.

All in all, it has been a banner month for women in science and science fiction.  Let's hope that Tereshkova, Goldsmith, Blair, and MacLennan continue to serve as role models for other pioneering women, in the far reaches of outer space or deep within the human imagination.

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Science / Space Race

[June 20, 1963] Crossing stars (the flights of Vostoks 5 and 6)

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by Gideon Marcus

Gordo Cooper's 22-orbit flight in Faith 7 afforded America a rare monopoly on space news during the month of May.  Now, a new Soviet spectacular has put the West in the shade and ushered in a new era of spaceflight.

On June 14, Lt. Colonel Valery Bykosky zoomed into orbit atop the same type of rocket and in the same type of Vostok capsule that took his four predecessors to space.  Call signed "Hawk," he circled the Earth for just a hair shy of five days, beating the previous record set by Andrian Nikolayev in Vostok 3 by a few minutes.  Bykovsky conducted experiments, floated unstrapped from his seat a few times, ate, slept, and otherwise did the normal things one might expect of a cosmonaut.  He landed early yesterday morning.

That's not the exciting bit.

Two days after Hawk's flight began, he was joined by "Seagull" in Vostok 6.  As with the twin flights of Vostoks 3 and 4, Hawk and Seagull's trajectories were tailored to overlap so that the two spacecraft could get within hailing distance.  They shared radio transmissions and reported observing each other.  Vostok 6 landed around the same time as Vostok 5.  In most ways, the mission of Hawk and Seagull marked no new ground over the previous joint mission.

Except one: Vostok 6 was crewed by Valentina Tereshkova, a textile worker from Moscow.  She was the first woman and the first civilian in space. 

Let that settle in.  There are a lot of ramifications. 

When Project Mercury was established, NASA solicited applicants with a specific set of talents.  They had to be male military test pilots with thousands of hours of jet experience.  Seven were ultimately chosen, six of whom have flown.

Six Soviets have also flown.  Five were male military test pilots, but the sixth had never enlisted.  Tereshkova's closest relevant experience is that her hobbies included parachuting.  That the Soviet space program anticipated and insisted on including a civilian woman is significant.  Moreover, in her sole space flight, she logged more hours than all previous American astronauts combined.

You can call it a media stunt.  You can sneer that the Vostok capsules are bigger and more automated and therefore Tereshkova's role was limited to that of a passenger, not a pilot.  That's cold comfort, though.  The fact is, the Russians are thinking long-term.  They want to know how space affects men and women because they intend on not just conquering space but settling it.  Furthermore, they are demonstrating that Communism is an equal-opportunity business.  For all of our touting of democracy, America has no plans to let women join the space corps. 

So let's tally where we are in the "manned" space race as of June 1963.  The Americans have just finished the Mercury program, which had six flights, two of them suborbital.  The longest mission lasted a day-and-a-half.  There won't be another crewed flight until late '64, when the two-manned Gemini goes up.

Meanwhile, the Soviets launched six crewed Vostoks over roughly the same period.  But, they got there "fustest with the mostest," (Gagarin went up a month before Shepard), all of the flights were orbital, Vostok has an endurance at least three times that of Mercury, the Soviets mastered the art of double-launching, and, of course, their program is sophisticated enough to accommodate a non-pilot.  America may have been the first to break the sound barrier, but the Communists were the first to break the space gender barrier.

Our one consolation is that the near real-time appreciation of the Vostok flights was made possible by the existence of American communications satellites.  The TV transmissions from Vostoks 5 and 6 were relayed across the Atlantic via Telstar.  That's a pretty weak "yeah, but." 

Here's a better one.  Let's bring women into the astronaut corps.  In fact, there is already a reserve of thirteen woman pilots who have voluntarily subjected themselves to and passed the same test regimen as the Mercury 7.  Led by NASA consultant, Jerrie Cobb, they've been waiting in the wings for three years now.  They are eager and fit to fly — all they need is the green light from the space agency.  Given that the next class of astronauts will include civilians, there should be no barrier to letting one of these qualified women fly in Gemini and/or Apollo.

There shouldn't be…

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Science / Space Race

[May 22, 1963] Beyond the Typewriter (IBM Computers and how they work)

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by Ida Moya

I was very impressed by this month’s paean to the IBM Selectric Typewriter by traveler Victoria Lucas. Her sensuous love of the very physicality of the thing really got to me. As I mentioned before, knowing how to type is what made me what I am today; I too used this panoply of ever-better equipment, so I really enjoyed her story. The IBM Selectric is an incredibly satisfying typewriter to operate.

The most intriguing part of Miss (Mrs.?) Lucas’ article was her closing question, “What are you going to do to steal my heart next, IBM?  For example, where is this computer thing going? Will it be the next love of my life?”

Answer: The computer will be the next love of your life. (Or maybe your master.)

My place of employ, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), is a frontrunner in adopting new computing technologies. I have worked in different capacities as LASL moved from calculating equipment that ran with hand-propelled gears and ratchet wheels, to things electrically controlled by mechanical switches, to those using electomechanical relays. (The IBM Selectric uses yet another kind of electromechanical switch, though since it is not properly a computer I won’t address it now.) The height of switching technology was until very recently vacuum tubes, which are now being by supplanted by transistors. Transistors, an amazing miniaturized technology, are much smaller than vacuum tubes, work faster, and don’t get as hot.

With computers, there are a lot of viewpoints from which one can focus. I think of computers more from the perspective of an operator: making software programs run on the computers, and producing and analyzing the results. Other people think about computer architecture — how does the data flow in and out of the computer, and what happens when the information is processed inside.

Here is a picture of one of the three vacuum tube-based IBM 704 computers at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. One of my colleagues, a computer operator, is shown opening the front door of the IBM 729 tape drive. As you can see, no special protective gear is required, and she doesn’t even have to wear a hair net. This is from just a few years ago; the computers we have now are even faster and more sophisticated.

The way we get a program into the computer is to punch the program onto cards, then use the card reader (the low piece of equipment in the center of this photograph) to transfer the program onto magnetic tapes. From the tape, the program is read into the computer’s core memory.

Data – for example, parameters for an experimental design study for a thermonuclear warhead, something you want to calculate over and over again with different settings — is then punched onto another set of cards, and read directly into the core memory. The program is transferred yet another time, to the CPU, the Central Processing Unit. There, the program acts on each of the data points in the core as appropriate. The results are printed out onto greenbar paper by the printer, which is the rightmost piece of equipment.

IBM produced this nifty card to illustrate the wonderful equipment they have to punch, sort, and interpret the cards.

We even have this little slide rule, which managers use to calculate how long it will take for keypunch operators to do a job. This little rule is our master – woe betide you if you cannot keep up!

I’m not sure what computing establishment this picture below is from, but here are a bunch of gals using IBM 026 card punches, very much like here at LASL. It’s nice to have a job and be a part of something important. But this windowless room jam packed with keypunch operators is depressing. Imagine how loud it is in there for these women. (Mary Whitehead tells me that when they were using calculators Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury, Australia, they had carpeting in the room and egg crates lining the walls to attempt to absorb some of the sound. Not so lucky here.)


From Wikipedia

And heaven help them if they ever have to use that fire extinguisher. The cords on the floor look like a real trip hazard. However, most of these gal are just working for a year or two before they get married and become housewives, so it doesn’t pay to make the conditions any better. Me, even though my husband works at the Santa Fe Railroad, we don’t have that luxury. We both have to work in order to make ends meet and raise our wonderful children. I suspect more and more women are going to join the workforce permanently in the coming years, and these conditions will become a lot more humane for all of the future computer workers.

Another perspective from which to understand computing is the physical components inside the computer that come together to make a larger whole. For example this IBM Field Replaceable Unit (FRU), pictured below. On top of the unit are several vacuum tubes, while the rest of the contraption consists of resistors, diodes, and other discrete components. Electrons flow through this and, ingeniously, compute the Boolean logic of ands, ors, and nots.

I took this module as a souvenir from our IBM 704 system when it was decommissioned. Unlike the computers built as one unique unit, like say the one-off computers ENIAC or MANIAC, the 704 is constructed of a small number of modules. If a component in one of these modules goes bad, the individual module is removed and quickly replaced with a new module – then the computer works again. The bad module can be tested and repaired at a more leisurely pace.  These computers are expensive to own and run; keeping them “up” as much as possible, for all three shifts, is imperative.

The IBM 7030 Stretch was also designed with modularity in mind. Instead of tubes, the Stretch uses transistors, as you can see on this Standard Modular System (SMS) card below. This particular module, about the size of a playing card, is a “two-way AND,” a particular kind of Boolean logic gate. SMS cards were first developed for the Stretch, and are also used in the brand new IBM 7090, 1401, and other super-fast IBM computers and peripherals of today.

If you look closely at the transistors, which are the metal cans, you can see the Texas-shaped brand mark of Texas Instruments. This American company has learned how to mass-produce transistors. Inside this can is a teeny little piece of germanium crystal, a “semiconductor,” with some probes attached. (And by attached, I mean soldered together by women using binocular microscopes and steady hands, jammed together in another terrible windowless room). Manipulating and transforming the way electrons flow through these cans is, ultimately how the computer does our bidding. Interestingly, computer operators don’t need to know about this in detail; we can leave it to the expert computer engineers and technicians.

IBM is not the only company using a modular strategy. For example a few days ago the traveler showed a brand-new Siemens 3003 computer system. I don’t have a parts book for this German company, so I don’t know what this particular module does, but you can see in the picture below there are two silver can-shaped transistors, plus some other colored packages of components.


(Courtesy of The Living Computer Museum

So, Miss Lucas, there is plenty to love about computers. Don’t get stuck just being a typist, and join us in the transistorized revolution!

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Science / Space Race

[May 16, 1963] Going out with style (Gordo Cooper's Faith 7 Mercury flight)

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by Gideon Marcus

Nearly six years ago, the Russians threw down the gauntlet with Sputnik.  Then they upped the ante with the orbit of Yuri Gagarin in April 1961.  It's hard to believe that, in just two years, America has not only answered the Soviet challenge but completed its first manned space program.

For those of us well-heeled in science fiction, the Mercury spacecraft is hardly impressive-looking.  Barely big enough to hold a person (and not a tall one, at that), it is little more than a second space suit with a heat shield and a retrorocket.  And yet, as a first step for America into outer space, its importance cannot be overstated.

For it was those first two Mercury-Redstone flights, Alan Shepard's and Gus Grissom's, which showed that one could survive both the crushing weight of acceleration and the exhilarating freedom from gravity, in close succession, no less.  John Glenn proved an astronaut could orbit repeatedly, and Scott Carpenter demonstrated that spacemen are unflappable when things don't go just right.  Wally Schirra doubled the mission length of his predecessors and perfected fuel conservation and landing accuracy. 

But it was this latest and last Mercury mission, flown by the youngest of the Mercury 7, 36-year old Gordo Cooper, that showed what an astronaut and his spacecraft could really do. 

The original Mercury configuration only allowed for short flights — no more than Schirra's six orbits (nine hours).  Cooper's mission was to get into the endurance range that the Soviet Vostok enjoys — a day and beyond.  That meant more batteries, more water, more oxygen, and more maneuvering fuel.  Some items had to be trimmed, weight being at a premium.  For instance, the largely irrelevant periscope was deleted, saving a precious 76 pounds.  The result was a stocked up, stripped down version of Mercury that Cooper called Faith 7.  NASA was not too happy with this choice, worried about the inevitable headline in the event of mission failure: America Loses Faith.

The flight of Faith was scheduled for April but weather and other considerations pushed the launch back to May.  Finally, early on the 14th, the astronaut suited up and entered his spacecraft.  After many hours of waiting, the flight was delayed until the next day.  There had been a problem with the Bermuda tracking radar.  It does one well to remember that an astronaut is just one of thousands of participants in any given mission, the failure of any one of whom can cause a scrub. 

All systems were go the next morning, however.  After a pleasant two-hour nap in his capsule while the countdown rolled and held without him, Cooper was then pressed into his seat with several times his weight come liftoff time, 8:04 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time.  Less than fifteen minutes later, he became the sixth American to enter Earth orbit.

The flight called for 22 orbits, with go/no-go opportunities after seven and seventeen.  Cooper was the first astronaut who got to sleep in orbit, though he spent the first hour of his designated slumber time snapping pictures of the Himalayas — and astonishing folks on the ground with his visual acuity.  According to the astronaut, he could pick out individual houses and vehicles from orbit. 

Orbit 17 came and went, and Cooper declared himself and his metal steed A-Okay to finish the mission.  But perhaps he had spoken too soon.  Come the 19th orbit, Faith 7 began to fall to pieces.  The cabin temperature rose, instrument readouts became erratic, and the automatic pilot failed completely.  As Cooper approached the end of the mission, he was confronted with a situation no one had ever had to face before: he would return himself from orbit manually.

Of course, that's why NASA hired test pilots for the job.  Cooper was delighted at the opportunity to show his stuff.  His aim and timing of his retrorocket fire was so precise that not only did he make it safely back to Earth, but he came down just a couple of miles from the recovery fleet off Midway Island.  Astronaut Cooper had flown longer and better than an American before him, ending is mission just before 4 P.M. EDT (11 AM local time).

Better still, Cooper had shared none of the deterioration of his spaceship.  Aside from a little pooling of blood in the legs, the astronaut was in good health.  Moreover, he experienced none of the disassociation from reality that psychologists worried would afflict long-term space travelers.  Faith 7 was, despite the breakdowns, a complete success.

In that success, Mercury has signed its own death warrant.  While some have clamored for a multi-day Mercury flight (particularly first astronaut Alan Shepard), the fact is, there just isn't much more to learn with such a minimal craft.  The longer, more involved missions are going to need a more sophisticated spacecraft.  A two-person ship with the ability to maneuver and dock.

It's in development right now, and it's called Gemini.  It flies next year.

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Science / Space Race

[May 4, 1963] The Love of My Life (so far)

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by Victoria Lucas

There is a miracle of modern technology that I haven't yet seen covered in these pages.  It's not much bigger than a breadbox (as Steve Allen would say) and has fewer moving parts than others of its kind.  If it weren't so expensive I would have bought one of my own by now.  Hint: you roll paper into it and type on it.  And it's electrical.

But first… a little story to explain why this invention is so exciting:

When I was 10, my mother, who was not allowed to work outside our home because people might think my dad couldn't support us, worked for my dad.  He purchased a used IBM Executive for her so that she could type a TV guide he published at the time.  I wanted to help, so she taught me to type, and specifically to type on the Executive, which allows for print-type-like spacing (half spaces, etc.). 

It was a little difficult to learn, but I soon got the hang of it.  It was fun to figure out how many words a line could hold and still be flush with the line above it at the right as well as the left, so you could do columns and "justified" pages (the term for flush right and left).  I will never forget typing rows and rows of local television programming of our three network stations in Tucson.
At the same time our baby grand piano that moved with us from California took up so much room that it occupied our small dining room by itself.  I took piano lessons until I was about 12, caressing the 88 keys.  Little did I think that one day I would use a typewriter with 88 characters on each type element!

Reluctantly, I skipped third-year Latin in high school to take secretarial courses (including a typing course) so I could make a living.  That was painful.  The old upright manual (no electricity) typewriters had keys so far apart that it was difficult for my little hands to reach from one side to the other to hit the "Return" key.  And the rows were far apart too.  The Executive had the advantage here: its keyboard had rows of keys at different heights, but the relative height of the keys was less and the spaces between them were filled.  (Coming from a theater background, I would call the height of the keys as they march up to the type basket a "rake.")

On the Executive it was easier to make my fingers fly over the keys, even for my hands as little as they were when I was 10.  On the manuals, my little fingers fell between the keys, squeezing them painfully, almost as often as they hit them.  Even reaching the space bar was a stretch. 

(A friend of mine reads detective stories, and, knowing about my way of making a living, he showed me some lines where Nero Wolfe's man Archie is asked to type and sign a statement.  He replies, "Glad to, if you'll give me a decent typewriter [in 1951]."  Then, he recalls, "What I got was what I expected, an Underwood about my age."  The Underwoods seemed to me to have the highest raked keyboards with the keys the farthest apart, but that's just my impression.)

Of course, in high school, I found myself envying Felicia Samoska, a tall woman with proportionately larger hands that easily spanned the manual keyboards and provided her with
beautiful and A+ CWPM (correct words per minute) scores.  We became friends, nevertheless; hers was the first and so far only wedding I’ve attended.  I had to accept the fact that I could never be a decent typist on a manual typewriter.  Both at home and at my mother's place of work (after she and my dad were divorced), I could use electric typewriters, and I enjoyed that.  (I think she also had an old L. C. Smith manual. Ugh!)

She taught me statistical typing, a specialty that required great accuracy and precise tabulation, done on an electric typewriter with an extra-long carriage.  I wanted to help, so sometimes when she picked me up from school we would go back to her work and I would help her finish up. 

Later I got the portable electric Smith Corona that came with its own rounded case, and except for the fact that it has a key basket and regular keys instead of a molded keyboard, I thought it was great.  I've typed hundreds, maybe thousands of pages on it by now, and it is wearing out.  It tires me out with keys that have to be punched, and my fingers still occasionally get stuck between keys, although the whole typewriter is smaller and has a lower what I think of as "rake" of the keyboard height.

But oh, then came the love of my life, my soul-mate, the IBM Selectric.

The Selectric typewriter one-uped the Smith Corona by singlehandledly destroying the carriage return.  When the Selectric's "carriage" "returns," it does not include the platen.  The only "carriage" is the metallic-looking plastic "type element" that looks like a little golf ball and moves on a slim wire from side to side inside the open top (making it all the more necessary to cover it when not in use to keep dust from getting on the works).  The keys are movable projections from a nearly flat surface, they are closer together than the keys on a manual typewriter, and they take little effort to press. 

"This is the best thing that's happened to typewriters since electricity," the commercial says.  Oh, yes!  Aw, look at its little face.  I want to kiss it! 

I'll never forget the day I first set eyes on you, lovely Selectric, at the University of Arizona Drama Department, where I now work.  You, embraceable you, with the little ball that moves and the platen that stays put, so the whole thing doesn't shake between lines.  You make it possible for me to type 120 correct words per minute without hardly trying.  Where have you been all my life?

Apparently, in the mind of architect Eliot Noyes, a frequent consultant to IBM who designs their buildings as well as their products.  This beautiful machine was first sold in 1961, and according to typewriter salesmen they're still a big hit. 

What are you going to do to steal my heart next, IBM?  For example, where is this computer thing going? Will it be the next love of my life?

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Science / Space Race

[Apr. 29, 1963] When a malfunction isn't (the flight of Saturn I #4 and other space tidbits)

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by Gideon Marcus

Baby's first step… Take Four

Out in Huntsville, Alabama, Von Braun's team is busy making the biggest rockets ever conceived.  The three-stage Saturn V, with five of the biggest engines ever made, will take people to the Moon before the decade is out.  But NASA's is justifiably leery of running before walking.  Moreover, there is use for a yet smaller (but still huge!) rocket for orbital Apollo testing and, also, practice building and launching Saturn rocket components.

Enter the two-stage Saturn I, whose first stage has eight engines, like the Nova, but they are much smaller.  Still, altogether, they produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust — that's six times more than the Atlas that will put Gordo Cooper's Mercury into orbit next month.  The Saturn I's second stage will likely also be the third stage on the Saturn V.

The Saturn I has had the most successful testing program of any rocket that I know of.  It's also one of the most maddeningly slow testing programs (I'm not really complaining — methodical is good, and it's not as if Apollo's ready to fly, anyway). 

The fourth in the series lifted off March 28, and they still aren't fueling the second stage.  They've essentially all been tests of stage #1.  This particular test was interesting because they shut off one of the engines on purpose during the flight to see if the other engines could compensate for the loss.  SA-4 continued to work perfectly, zooming to an altitude of 129 kilometers.

SA-4 was the last of the first-stage-only tests.  Henceforth, we'll get to see what the full stack can do. 

A breath of very thin fresh air

We tend to ignore most of the atmosphere.  After all, the air we breathe and most of the weather are confined to the first few kilometers above the Earth.  But the upper regions of the atmosphere contain the ozone layer, which shields us from deadly radiations; the ionosphere, which bounces radio waves back to Earth; beautiful and mysterious noctilucent clouds, only visible after sunset; and of course, spacecraft have to travel through it on their way up and down.  Knowing the makeup of our atmosphere gives us clues to understand climate, the history of the Earth, the interaction of our planet and the sun, and much more.

And yet, aside from the TIROS weather satellites, which only study the lowest level of the atmosphere, there has never been a dedicated atmospheric study satellite.  Sure, we've launched probes to detect radiation and charged particles and the Earth's magnetosphere.  Some have investigated the propagation of radio waves through the ionosphere.  But none have gone into space just to sample the thin air of the upper atmosphere and find out what's up there and how much.

Until now. 

Explorer 17 is a big, sputnik-looking ball loaded with a bunch of pressure gauges and other instruments.  Its sole purpose is to measure the the pressure and make-up of the upper atmosphere, from about 170 kilometers up. 

Launched on April 3rd, in its first few days of operation, the probe has more than tripled all previous measurements of neutral gases in Earth's upper atmosphere to date.  For instance, the satellite has discovered that the earth is surrounded by a belt of neutral helium at an altitude of from 250 to 1000 miles, a belt no one was sure it existed.  We suspected it, of course — helium, produced in the Earth's crust by the natural radioactive decay of heavy elements, is very light.  Just as helium balloons go up and up, free helium's normal fate is to eventually escape Earth's gravitational influence, leaving behind the heavier gasses. 

This is the first time this hypothesis had a chance to be proven, and by measuring the density of this helium, we should be able to get an idea of how much helium is generated by the Earth each year.  This, in turn, will tell us something about how much radioactive material is left on Earth.  Isn't that neat?  We send a probe far up into space to learn more about what's going on down here.  Your tax dollar hard at work.

The Cosmos opening up for Kosmos

Pop quiz — what did the Soviets accomplish last year in the Space Race?  Right.  The Soviets made big news with the flashy dual mission of Vostoks 3 and 4.  Anything else?  Can you recall a single space accomplishment for the Communists?  In 1962, the United States launched Telstar, the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO), three Explorer science probes, three Ranger moon probes, Mariner 2 to Venus, and a couple dozen military satellites, not to mention the orbital Mercury flights of John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Wally Schirra.

This year is a different story.  We Americans haven't slackened our pace, but the Russians have finally picked up theirs.  They've got a probe on its way to Mars, as well as a new series of satellites called Kosmos.  This month, they launched three, getting up to Kosmos 16.  They are touted as science satellites, but there has been precious little data from them made public or that's worked its way into scientific papers.  This suggests that the Kosmos program is really a civilian front for a military program.  That's the fundamental difference between the Western and Eastern space efforts.  While the American military takes up its share of the national space budget, we still make sure there's room for pure science.  The Soviets have chosen between guns and science in favor of the former (though, to be fair, if we could only afford one option, would we have made the same choice?)

So why did it take so long for the Soviets to get into the groove after having such a seemingly commanding lead in the Space Race?  And just what are the Kosmos satellites really doing up there? 

According to a NASA scientist, the lack of announced flights doesn't mean the Russians didn't try.  Our Communist friends are notorious for talking only about their successes.  In fact, the Soviets were trying a new four-stage version of the booster that launched Sputnik and Vostok, and the fourth stage kept failing.  There might have been a few failed moon missions in there, too, that we never heard about.  We probably only learned about Luna 4, launched April 2, because it took off just fine — it just missed its target (the Soviet reporting after lunar flyby was notably subdued). 

As for what Kosmos is, Aviation Weekly and Space Report suggests the series is really two types of satellites based on weight and orbital trajectory.  One is a small class of probe that stays up for months.  They could be akin to our Explorers, but again, they don't produce science (whereas ours have revolutionized our knowledge of near-Earth space).  More likely, they are engineering satellites designed to test various components for future missions: communications, cameras, navigation.

The other class is big — as big as the manned Vostoks.  They only fly a few days, too, and their orbits cover most of the globe.  These could be unmanned tests of the next generation of Soviet manned spacecraft.  But they also could be repurposed Vostoks designed to conduct spy missions.  Perhaps the Soviet Union is sending up cosmonauts with camera in hand (as we have done on the Mercury missions).  Sure, it's more expensive than our Discoverer spy sats, but everything's free in a command economy, right?

In any event, the world once again has two active space superpowers.  What happens next is anyone's guess…




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Science / Space Race

[Mar. 30, 1963] Mercury waltzes Matilda (the tracking and research station at Woomera, Australia)

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by Ida Moya

I’m back from a whirlwind of helping the data analysts at Los Alamos get their FORTRAN formulas running on that balky old IBM Stretch computer. I can see why IBM only made 8 of these things. It is miraculous to have a computer that can fit into a single room, but this stretch (pardon the pun) in computing technology still averages only 17 hours uptime a day — and that’s also a stretch (no more, I promise).

When it breaks, this swarm of white-coated men in ties comes in and fusses around with it with a bunch of special tools, as well as the set of ALDs (Automated Logic Diagrams) that come with every IBM computer. The way those diagrams are produced and updated with punch cards and special line printers is an amazing story, but for another time.

Although we at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory can comfort ourselves that the Stretch is the fastest computer in the world, I’m still envious of the institutions that have the better-engineered IBM 7090 computers. These are being used for calculations for the exciting Mercury program.


IBM 7090 at the Weapons Research Establishment's headquarters at Salisbury, on the northern outskirts of Adelaide in South Australia.

The Mercury spaceships do not have a computer on board – computers are far too heavy – so for figuring out how to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere the astronauts rely on computations sent by radio from the pair of IBM 7090 computers at the Mercury Control Station at Cape Canaveral. It’s an incredible amount of faith to put in one site, so Mercury control has those two redundant IBM computers, plus another set of computers in New Jersey. A third computer gathering information from the flight is on the other side of the globe — in Adelaide processing tracking data collected at at Weapons Research Establishment in Woomera, Australia. There is also another control center at Muchea, in Western Australia.


Control room of the astronaut tracking station at Muchea in Western Australia, part of US Project Mercury

A lot of people haven’t heard of Woomera, so let me tell you a little bit about it. At Woomera, more is being done than track Mercury astronauts. This part's an open secret, but the Brits and the Aussies are working together there on testing (or doing “trials” as they say) on rockets, missiles, and even atomic weapons. That's why they built this testing range in the middle of nowhere, in the outback of Australia.


Woomera Research Establishment Officer’s mess

A few years ago we had a visit from Bill Boswell, the Woomera director, along with a team from Maths Services, and Mary Whitehead, the leader of the Planning and Data Analysis Group. They were visiting various computer installations at Point Mugu, White Sands, and Cape Canaveral. These are all larger-than life place-names, but they really just represent groups of men and women madly making observations, coding the photographs in a way the computer can understand, and using these results to steer the manned spaceships. Mary and I had time to talk about more prosaic things, like her new apartment (or “flat” as they call it down under) in Woomera village, and the troubles of living so far from civilization.


Mary’s new flat at Woomera

Woomera reminds me a lot of Los Alamos. It is a similar purpose-built town, isolated from the surrounding population by remoteness and security. Entire families live there, with houses, apartments, and schools for the kids. There are clubs and mess halls; a bowling alley and community grocery store. The store sells just canned and packaged food; if you want something fresh the closest produce is 50 miles away. The planners made a lot of efforts to plant trees, most of which failed. Honestly, it sounds awful to me. I love the "Land of Enchantment" (New Mexico), where things actually grow. The two science towns also have odd mixed populations – for Los Alamos, it is the influx of American and foreign scientists, local Hispanos, and the San Ildefonso tribe. In Woomera, it is the influx of British scientists, local Aussies, and the aboriginal people. Personally I think Los Alamos does a better job of integrating the native population.


Community store in Woomera

There’s something about space that is so exciting. Space has it all: exploration, discovery, danger, and destiny. There’s so much more to it than my dry work of computers, trajectory calculations, and strangely named groups that I am so mired in. That’s why I am so excited to find science fiction and Galactic Journey’s reviews, which is opening my mind to our real future in space that this work makes possible.




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