Computers Were Vital to NASA
NASA used computers from its earlies years. But these weren’t the room-sized processors with blinking lights and punch cards of the 1960s; their computers had names. And human bodies. These ‘computers,’ usually women, had been involved in experimental flight and aviation since Barbara Canright joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1939, calculating the number of rockets necessary to propel spacecraft and calculating weight-to-thrust ratio. While NASA was using mechanized computers by the 1950s, they didn’t fully trust them. They still relied on calculations done by humans, and hired computers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to conduct accurate and complex calculations for NASA. One of the earliest human computers, Sue Finley, was still working at NASA in 2016, the “longest-serving female employee.” She was hired in 1958 to conduct trajectory calculations for rocket launches, and was most recently working on a Jupiter-bound mission.