More than 50 years before the current Artemis II mission, Downey played an important part in putting the first human beings on the lunar surface.
Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL.
1953. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Computer Group. From 1943 through the 1950s, JPL, located in La Cañada Flintridge, designed rockets for the U.S. Army (the organization came under NASA in 1958). Since electronic computers would not appear until the 1960s, JPL needed human computers to calculate trajectories for rockets. A “computer” originally meant a worker who did complex mathematical calculations. Such a task was then seen as “women’s work,” so, mathematically-inclined young women were the ones hired for this job out of high school or college. By the mid 1950s, about two dozen women formed the JPL Computer Group, under the supervision of Macie Roberts, a former IRS auditor. Even as electronic computers began to appear in the early 1960s, male JPL engineers continued to think of computer work as a female task, leaving it to women computers to be the early programmers and coders. Roberts appears in the group photo, first row, eighth from left. Also pictured is Janez Lawson, sixth from left, the first African American hired by JPL into a technical position, who went on to become an IBM programmer for JPL.
One of Pomona's own has been piloting the Artemis II mission to the moon and back.
