Rise of the Rocket Girls Quotes

“In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“Her team had become NASA’s first computer programmers. The women still worked closely with the engineers, almost all of whom were men, but it was no longer enough for them just to be good at math. They needed to know how to build, fix, and run programs on the IBM computers, something the engineers rarely did.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“As Carl Sagan said, “Observation: I can’t see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“When the handwritten guidance program was transcribed in Florida, a superscript bar was mistakenly left off the program. That one mistake meant that the program wasn’t able to correct the rocket’s course. Both the hardware failure of the Atlas antenna and the software bug in its guidance system meant that Mariner was completely out of control.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“Barbara laughed when she saw the list of objectives: “1. Get pictures, 2. Refine space guidance techniques, 3. Impress the world.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“He made her laugh, and when she spoke, Barbara could tell he was completely present, listening to her words eagerly.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“When the small plane went airborne without the aid of a single propeller, it made the first American rocket-powered airplane flight.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“Her work would inform mission control if the first American satellite would be a success or a crushing failure.”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“Eleanor Roosevelt said, “We know what we have to face, and we know that we are ready to face it,”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“a timid smile as she held up an astronomy award for her asteroid discoveries. Exactly how long had this woman worked at NASA? I wondered. Did women even work at NASA as scientists during the 1950s? Unfortunately it looked like I might never find out. Helin had passed away a year before, in 2009. When my daughter was born, in the last hours of December 14, 2010, we”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“there, the longest-serving woman of the American space program. Their stories give us an inside look at pivotal moments in American history, from a perspective never before told. Since the cold night my Eleanor Frances was born, I’ve thought of these women often—particularly when the mood is intense. In my years as a microbiologist, I’ve tinkered with”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“was crisp, yet the archivists at NASA knew only a few of the women’s names and weren’t sure what had become of them. It seemed their stories had been lost in the shuffle of history. While we tend to think of the role women played during the early years at NASA as secretarial, these women were the antithesis of that assumption. These young female engineers shaped much of our history and the technology we have”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

“Whiling away time between JATO tests in Muroc, California, today Edwards Air Force base, Walter Powell was playing with a toy airplane. Frank was curt with him: “Put away the toy, Walt. It’s not a playground.” Walter was furious. For the first few years their work had always had an element of play. Now things were changing. When Frank went back to his office, Walter couldn’t stop thinking about his rebuke. If Frank didn’t take him seriously, he would make him listen. He grabbed a hatchet and stood outside Frank’s office, holding it over his head. Letting out a yell, he brought the blade against the closed door. Once, twice, three times. Through”
― Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars