Between 1969 and 1972 there were six Apollo human spaceflight missions to the Moon, each leaving a complex site behind. A common joke now is that the average smart phone has more computing power than an Apollo spacecraft, and while this may be true, that these early computers could take men to the Moon and back is truly astonishing.
Today computing and IT are male-dominated fields, but in the 1960s, it was women – so much so that women were called ‘computers’. Why? Programming was considered a menial, repetitive task, suited for the inferior intellectual capacity of women. What this meant, though, was that women were at the forefront of the nascent field of computing before it became prestigious and men edged them out.
| Prototype of core rope memory Mark Richards/Computer History Museum |
The supervisors responsible for overseeing the careful integration of changes and additions to the software were known as “rope mothers,”
regardless of their actual gender identity.
The rope mother’s boss, though, was a woman:
. Before Apollo, Hamilton worked as a programmer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory on the
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air-defense system. After MIT won the contract to supply the guidance and navigation system for Apollo, Hamilton got a job working on the systems software, and she eventually led the team that created the onboard flight software.
In the video below, you can see women working on many parts of the Apollo guidance computer (of course they are always ‘girls’). If you watch carefully, you will see a ‘hidden figure’ – an African-American worker. At one point, you can see the workroom behind the men talking – note that no women get the chance to speak – full of women wearing a loose sort of shirt over their clothes, and chatting to each other as they go about their delicate and precision work – it’s a busy and happy sort of lab!
You can see that women were involved in testing the micrologic units of the Apollo guidance computer and putting all the components together. Clearly it wasn’t just the core rope memory, the component that elicits so much excitement. Many parts of the process were automated and the women operated the machines. Some of the women recruited were seamstresses, used to threading.
Core rope memory was not used in the descent modules, which stayed on the lunar surface while the ascent modules took off again to dock with the waiting command module which had been orbiting the Moon all the while. Once the astronauts had all moved into the command module, the ascent module was jettisoned. The command module returned to Earth and the ascent modules crashed onto the surface of the Moon.
- Apollo 11: location unknown
- Apollo 12: 3.94 S, 21.20 W.
- Apollo 14: 3.42 S, 19.67 W
- Apollo 15: 26.39 N, 0.25 E
- Apollo 16: location unknown
- Apollo 17: 19.96 N, 30.50 E.
So at those locations, part of the significant fabric is the core rope memory. What does this mean? Well, when the cultural significance (historic, scientific, aesthetic, social, spiritual) of the impact sites of the crashed ascent modules is assessed, the presence of this technology gives them extraordinary historic and social significance.
But wait. The story of the core rope memory and Margaret Hamilton is well known now, but didn’t we see women working on all aspects of the Apollo guidance computer in the MIT video? I believe we did. So the descent modules also have computer hardware, as well as software, made by women. They are part of the history of space travel and computing, and how women were excluded both from being astronauts and computer scientists. But they’re still there, at every Apollo landing site. On the Moon.