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Gladys Perkins: The Pioneer Who Took Us To New Heights

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Command Line Heroes • • Gladys Perkins | Command Line Heroes

Gladys Perkins | Command Line Heroes

About the episode

Is the moon made of cheese? Of course not. But can a person walk on the surface? Not too long ago, we couldn’t answer that question. But with the help of Gladys Perkins, we soon figured out that we could send a team to the moon and have them safely land on its surface.

There was a time when the United States was behind the Soviets in the space race. Everyone had their sights set on the moon. Andrew Chaikin describes NASA’s disastrous Ranger missions. Erik Conway explains how complicated the trajectory calculations were—and to top it all off, why they often couldn’t be done in advance. To succeed, NASA’s new Surveyor program would need the capability to adjust trajectory mid-flight. Gladys Perkins made those calculations possible. But her part in this story hasn’t been well documented. Our editor Kim Huang recounts how difficult it was to get details of her story. And Vahe Peroomian explains how important it is to get these histories told to inspire the next generation to take on moonshot projects.

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Transcript

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. It was 10:56 P.M. Eastern Time on July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong placed his left foot on the dusty surface of the moon. More than 600 million people were watching that moment on their black-and-white televisions, fascinated by the culmination of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But behind that one moment, that famously small step, there were many other steps that remained invisible to the millions watching Neil Armstrong. These were steps taken by heroes whose names have been almost lost to history. I'm Saron Yitbarek, and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. You know, before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could land on the moon, scientists, analysts, and computer engineers had to band together and learn how to plot a lunar trajectory—a flight path to the moon. And then, they had to figure out how to touch down without blowing everything up! Two pretty huge problems with life-and-death consequences for wrong answers. This is the story of the years of work that went into getting those answers right. Literally thousands of brilliant minds—at NASA and elsewhere — were bent toward this goal, and most of them never became famous. This whole season, we've been learning about heroes we barely knew, pioneers in science and technology who nudged humanity forward while staying out of the spotlight. And this time we're celebrating our most hard-to-find hero yet—an engineer named Gladys Perkins. Her work on lunar trajectories helped Neil Armstrong land on his feet. We were blown away when we learned about her achievements, especially when we thought about what it meant to be a Black woman working in a very white, very male field. And, at the same time, we were frustrated—because so much of Perkins' life and work seemed to have vanished from the history books. This is our attempt to write Gladys Perkins back into history. She wasn't in the top brass at NASA. She wasn't likely to be famous. And yet, she was just as much a part of this historical mission. This audacious plan where, with enough work and bright minds, we could send a person to the moon and bring them home again. Did you ever see that 1902 film "A Trip to the Moon" by George Méliès? Where the moon has an actual human face? A team of Victorian astronomers use a cannon to launch their rocket, and it basically smooshes into the lunar surface. Lucky shot. Well, in the earliest days of space exploration, that was basically the strategy. Take a rough sort of aim, fire, and cross your fingers. I'm exaggerating. But not by much. The first two Rangers, they never even made it into the proper orbits because the launch vehicle failed. Historian Andrew Chaikin walked us through NASA's early attempts to sidle up close to the moon. The Ranger Program started in 1960. Some called it "Shoot and Hope," which might explain why they didn't put any humans on board. On the third Ranger mission, they had a single error in the sign of a number within the software that was programmed into the upper stage of the launch vehicle, the booster, that was supposed to correct the flight path on the way to the moon in what's called a mid-course correction. And that inverted sign reversed the mid-course correction parameters and caused the spacecraft to miss the moon entirely. So, that was Ranger 3. Ranger 4 failed because of a power short that took place when the spacecraft separated from its booster. Okay. That's Ranger 4. On Ranger 5, again, they lost power. So, it was a dead spacecraft. I'm kind of surprised they were still getting money for these things, but okay. And Ranger 6, one of the strangest failures of all. Geeze. What happened was that, when the booster rocket cut off as it was launching off the Earth and into space, there's a little bit of fuel and oxidizer, liquid oxygen and kerosene, that get released from the booster as it separates from the upper stage. And that ignited. And that created a cloud of plasma that enveloped the Ranger spacecraft and shorted out a crucial electrical connection. And once again, they had a dead spacecraft on the way to the moon. Finally, Rangers 7, 8, and 9 did succeed in transmitting pictures before crashing into the moon. But NASA's Ranger Program was basically a learning experience, an expensive learning experience. And here's what they learned: the old "fire and hope" approach wasn't going to work for their ambitious follow-up missions. They needed to get much more sophisticated about their trajectories. Because the next program, called Surveyor, wasn't just going to crash into the moon. It was going to land softly. In the Surveyor program, the project was to land a spacecraft gently on the lunar surface so it would survive the landing. That's Erik Conway, historian for the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech. He explained that for a spacecraft to survive landing on the moon, you need to know where you're going with extreme precision. If you know nothing about the structure of the lunar surface, then you need to pick someplace that's relatively safe to land. And that means that you need to hit a relatively small target. So, you need much more precision in your flight path than you do if you're just trying to crash something into the moon. The problem is, calculating the right trajectory for a soft landing is incredibly complex. And if anything goes wrong along the way, you need to be able to make adjustments. Conway described just how tricky those calculations were getting. Getting to the moon is what's called a three-body problem in celestial mechanics, which is actually unsolvable analytically. You have the Earth, you have the moon, you have your spacecraft, and they're all pulling on each other gravitationally. And you can't solve that problem exactly. You have to do it numerically. You have to approximate, step by step by step. Here's the thing that really made things tricky, though. The calculations had to be done as the mission was happening. You can't do the calculation in advance because you never hit your target trajectory exactly. Your booster always has some error in it. It doesn't perform quite the way it's supposed to. So, you have to correct your trajectory in flight. So, you have to do these calculations very quickly. That's the context that Gladys Perkins stepped into at Hughes Aircraft, where she was hired to work on the Surveyor program. Hughes had been contracted by NASA to build the actual Surveyor spacecraft. But JPL, which Conway works for, was supposed to handle mission operations, including the trajectory calculations. Problem was, JPL's software for computing trajectories was painfully slow. JPL's trajectory program was very complicated and took a long time to run on the computers of the time. Remember, this is the 1960s. Computers were much less powerful, and every calculation was precious. For trajectory calculations for planetary missions, JPL had a very general-purpose program that could handle any planet, any trajectory, do lots of different things. But for Surveyor, they only needed to go to the moon. So, they didn't need this general-purpose program. Hughes basically said, "Forget your complicated, all-purpose program. We're going to design something simpler and faster." And that's where Gladys Perkins came in. Gladys Perkins at Hughes designed a much more streamlined program specifically for lunar missions that would run much faster. Conway walked us through what made Perkins' program such an improvement. What she did is, instead of having the very computationally intensive accurate program that JPL had, she designed a much simpler approximation that ran much faster but was accurate enough for what they needed. Perkins' program could calculate a new trajectory in about an hour, compared to the eight hours it took JPL's software. And as Conway put it, "That made all the difference in the world," because the Surveyor missions had tight timelines. By the time you got your tracking data back from the Deep Space Network and plugged it into the computer to figure out what your actual trajectory was and what kind of correction you needed to make, if it took you eight hours to do that calculation, your window for doing the maneuver might have already passed. Perkins' faster trajectory software meant that the teams could make course corrections when they needed to. And that was key to the Surveyor program's success. Where the Rangers had mostly failed, Surveyor missions 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7 all successfully soft-landed on the moon. Those successes provided NASA with the data they needed to plan the Apollo missions that would eventually put humans on the lunar surface. It's pretty incredible when you think about it. Gladys Perkins wrote the software that helped clear the path for the Apollo missions and the first human moon landing. But as our story editor Kim Huang discovered when she researched this episode, Perkins' contributions have been largely overlooked by history. As our team researched this episode, we found very little information about Gladys Perkins online, which was incredibly frustrating. The little we did find came from African American newspapers from the 1940s and '50s that covered her academic achievements and early career moves. Here's what Kim and the team were able to piece together about Gladys Perkins' remarkable life. She was born in Crenshaw, Mississippi, in October 1921. She graduated from LeMoyne-Owen College, a historically Black college, in 1943 with a degree in mathematics. Then, she went to work for NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become part of NASA. One newspaper clipping we found said she was the first African American woman hired by NACA in a professional capacity. Whether or not that's accurate, it does highlight how rare it was for Black women to work in aerospace at the time. After NACA, Perkins moved to Hughes Aircraft in 1957, where she would spend the next 23 years of her career. That's where she did her groundbreaking work on the Surveyor program. But again, details about her specific contributions are scarce. It's heartbreaking, actually, how little we know about someone who made such important contributions to space exploration. And I think that speaks to broader issues about whose stories get preserved and whose get forgotten. The fact that we know anything about Gladys Perkins at all is largely thanks to the Black press of the 1940s and '50s, newspapers that made a point of covering the achievements of African Americans when the mainstream media ignored them. Those newspapers were doing something really important: they were creating a historical record of Black achievement that might not have existed otherwise. And that's part of why we can tell Gladys Perkins' story today, even if it's just a fragment of what her full story probably was. What we do know is that Perkins' work was crucial to the success of the Surveyor program, which in turn was crucial to the success of Apollo. Without the data that Surveyor missions provided about the lunar surface, NASA wouldn't have known where it was safe to land humans on the moon. The Surveyor missions told us what the lunar surface was like. They took pictures, they took soil samples, they measured the bearing strength of the lunar surface to make sure that a lunar module wouldn't just sink into the dust when it landed. So, when Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the moon in 1969, he was stepping into a landscape that had been mapped and measured by the Surveyor missions. And those missions succeeded in large part because of Gladys Perkins' innovative trajectory software. It's a chain of contribution that connects a Black woman born in rural Mississippi in 1921 to one of humanity's greatest achievements. But you won't find Gladys Perkins' name in most histories of the space program. Her story has been lost in the shuffle, overshadowed by the more famous names and faces of the space race. That's why I think it's so important to tell these stories, even when we only have fragments. Because people like Gladys Perkins deserve to be remembered. Their contributions deserve to be recognized. And their stories can inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists. Especially young Black women and girls who might see themselves in Gladys Perkins' story and think, "If she could do it in the 1960s, what could I do today?" Exactly. Representation matters. Seeing people who look like you achieve great things gives you permission to dream big yourself. Gladys Perkins retired from Hughes Aircraft in 1980 after a 23-year career there. She died in 1999 at the age of 78. And while we may never recover the full story of her life and achievements, what we do know is enough to recognize her as a true pioneer of the space age. I think it's really important that we recognize all the people who contributed to these great achievements, not just the famous astronauts and engineers whose names everyone knows. Because it really was a team effort involving thousands of people, and many of them were women and people of color who didn't get the recognition they deserved at the time. And that brings us to today, where NASA is once again setting its sights on ambitious goals: returning to the moon, and eventually going to Mars. These new missions will require the same kind of innovation and teamwork that made the Apollo program successful. And hopefully, this time around, the contributions of people like Gladys Perkins won't be forgotten. Some of the stakes are exactly the same. Vahe Peroomian, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California, helped us see how NASA today has a similar mission to the one Gladys Perkins and her team were chasing. The question is, will NASA be the first on the surface of Mars or will it, for example, be SpaceX. There's also a chance that China might get there, if we stumble too many times in our planning. When you're going to Mars, the trajectory calculations are more complex. Mars has an atmosphere, for starters, which means you need heat shields. But it doesn't have enough atmosphere that you can rely on aerobraking. So, you're doing a power dissent, which makes things even more difficult. And also, you know, Mars is really far away. Going directly to Mars and landing on its surface without entering orbit first is like taking a basketball here in L.A., having your net be somewhere in New York, and the net is moving away from you at about three kilometers per second, and you shoot the basketball and you swish it without hitting anything else. So, that's how complicated it is literally to land something on Mars. But here is what the Mars mission and the moon mission have in common. Just like in the 1960s, today's race towards Mars is about inspiring the next generation. Millions of schoolchildren in the 1960s and '70s were inspired by the landing on the moon. I was only 4 years old when the first moon landing happened and I became a scientist, I became a physicist, driven by those moon landings. And I think a successful Mars mission would go a really long way towards inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers. That inspiration can map out a whole new horizon for people, and it can help everybody believe a little more in the power of science. What a long way that's going to go to returning science to the forefront of our thoughts, something that's really missing nowadays from public discourse. And I'm really hoping that in the next decade, as we return back to the moon and go to Mars, that that will change and we will become a more scientifically literate population. That kind of cultural change doesn't rely, in the end, on one man stepping on the moon. It relies on all the thousands of Gladys Perkins doing the work behind the scenes that got them there. When you watch Neil Armstrong step off the moon on that historic evening of July 20, 1969, and you see he is a little tentative. Very fine-grained as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. Andrew Chaikin saw something that a lot of people missed in that broadcast. He puts his foot down. He tests his weight. He's still holding onto the lander. He's dragging his foot back and forth through the dust to kind of gauge its properties. And then, he puts both feet on the moon while he's still holding on. And then, finally he lets go and he stands on the surface of the moon and starts to walk around. It has a stark beauty all its own. Think of the confidence you have to have to take that step, confidence in the engineers, the coders, the technicians who all made that moment happen. Gladys Perkins died in 1999 at the close of the century that she helped define. We found her obituary in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a historical Black newspaper that still publishes today. And we were able to trace through a few other clues of how a Black woman born during segregation went on to be a key player in one of humanity's most noble endeavors, thanks in part to Black newspapers throughout the country who shined a light on their community when nobody else did. It's truly inspiring. But we still need to know so much more about this pioneer. Here is Kim Huang again with a special request. If you have any information about Gladys Patricia Perkins, please contact the Command Line Heroes team. I would be more than thrilled to find out more about this amazing person. I feel really connected emotionally to this story, and I'm really thankful for the opportunity to work on it. All the details we're able to find will be collected for you to explore at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. Next time, it's our season finale. And we're going to meet one of my personal heroes, a woman who transformed the world of venture capital and brought new levels of opportunity to Silicon Valley. Arlan Hamilton. Until then, I'm Saron Yitbarek, and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Keep on coding.

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About the show

Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.