THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT QUARTERLY
Volume 19, Number 2
2012OUEST
DEVELOPMENT OF THE
X-15 AT NACA LANGLEY
AERONAUTICAL LABORATORY
SUPER DYNA-SOAR:
THE USAF DYNA-SOAR
SYSTEM PROGRAM OFFICE
IN-HOUSE PROPOSAL
JOHN TRIBE: 
TALES OF A ROCKET ENGINEER
MY LIFE AS A NASA
FLIGHT CONTROLLER
Mercury Apollo VIII Launch Control Operations
Gemini
Space Shuttle
Features
4 Chasing Theory to the Edge of Space:
The Development of the X-15 at NACA Langley 
Aeronautical Laboratory
By Robert C. Moyer and Mary E. Gainer
34 My Life as a NASA Flight Controller 
By Cecil N. Bassham
45 Super Dyna-Soar:
The USAF Dyna-Soar System Program Office 
In-House Proposal 
By David Stern
Oral History
19 John Tribe: Tales of a Rocket Engineer 
Interview by Joel Powell
Contents
Volume 19 • Number 2   2012
Q U E S T   19:2    2012
1
More Book Reviews
58 Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps:
Politics and Logistics at NASA, 1972-2004
Book by Amy E. Foster
Review by Michael J. Neufeld
59 The Apollo Guidance Computer:
Architecture and Operation
Book by Frank O’Brien
Review by Paul Ceruzzi
60 When Biospheres Collide:
A History of NASA’s Planetary Protection 
Programs
Book by Michael Meltzer
Review by Lisa Westwood
61 Smoke Jumper, Moon Pilot:  
The Remarkable Life of Apollo 14 Astronaut
Stuart Roosa
Book by Willie G. Moseley
Review by Benjamin S. Zibit
62 Lights of Mankind:
The Earth at Night As Seen from Space
Book by L. Douglas Keeney
Review by Andrew K. Johnston
63 A Kansan Conquers the Cosmos
Or, “Spaced Out All My Life!”
Book by Alan Glines
Review by Jim Remar
64 Into the Cosmos:
Space Exploration and Soviet Culture
Edited by James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi
Review by Brian Frank
Book Reviews
54 Turning Dust to Gold:
Building a Future on the Moon and Mars
Book by Haym Benaroya
Review by Harley Thronson
55 SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History
Book by Dan Linehan
Review by Scott Sacknoff
56 Selecting the Mercury Seven:
The Search for America’s First Astronauts
Book by Colin Burgess
Review by Matthew H. Hersch
57 Beyond Pluto:
Exploring the Outer Limits of the Solar System
Book by John Davies
Review by Roger D. Launius
Front Cover Images
Mission control from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and
Space Shuttle programs. Credit: NASA
Q U E S T   19:2    2012
58
By Amy E. Foster
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011
ISBN 978-1-4214-0195-9
Pages:  224
Price:   $55.00, hardcover
During the last two decades of the recently concluded
Shuttle program, the appointment of women astronauts to
Shuttle and Space Station crews became a non-event—unless
a woman sat in the pilot or commander’s seat on the orbiter.
At the very end of this valuable and well-researched mono-
graph, Amy Foster notes that, while the integration of women
into the astronaut corps has to be considered “one of
[NASA’s] success stories[,] …women are nowhere nearing
parity with the men” in the corps (158). That does not appear
to be the agency’s fault, but judging by Foster’s narrative, this
imbalance is rooted in continuing social barriers to the
advancement of women in the pipeline careers of piloting and
science, technology and medicine. Nonetheless, Foster’s nar-
rative is predominantly a positive one, a story of prejudices,
barriers, and technological problems overcome, leading to
progress in how the United States conducted its human space-
flight program.
The author comes to her narrative, as she explicitly
states at the outset, from the standpoint of labor history and
the history of technology. Her labor history is clearly not in
the usual genre of studies of working-class occupations, but
rather examines an elite, white-collar, science-and-technology
job. She strains a bit justifying a case study of such an atypi-
cal occupation on that basis. Not that this rationale will matter
deeply to space historians, who will welcome a scholarly his-
tory of how the idea and reality of women astronauts
advanced after the hopes dashed in the first “Women in Space
Program”—the medical examinations of 13 women at the
Lovelace Clinic in 1959/60, a group later erroneously dubbed
the “Mercury 13” by journalists. Margaret Weitekamp in Right
Stuff, Wrong Sex (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005), has of
course definitively researched that history; Foster’s revised
dissertation might well be considered a sequel. 
Foster covers the Lovelace women’s story again in
Chapter 3, and it at first seems a little too familiar, but she
quickly moves on to the lesser-known aftermath, episodic dis-
cussions of the possibility of women astronauts in the context
of Valentina Tereshkova’s flight in June 1963 and the selec-
tions of scientist-astronauts in 1964 and 1967. Nonetheless,
choosing a woman astronaut was still a remote prospect as a
result of entrenched gender attitudes and NASA’s focus on the
urgencies of the Moon race, followed by a long drought in the
hiring of new astronauts caused by the sharp decline of
NASA’s budget and human spaceflight ambitions after
Apollo.
Foster only reaches her core story—as expressed in the
subtitle to the book—on page 67 (of only 159 pages of text),
when she begins to work through the origins of the selection
of the first class of Shuttle astronauts, Group VIII of 1978.
Changes in federal civil rights law and NASA’s promotion of
Equal Employment Opportunity, often ahead of much of the
civil service, meant that, instead of women and minority astro-
nauts being a problem, suddenly they were de facto a require-
ment, otherwise NASA would have been embarrassed by the
announcement of a new, all-white-male class. That, and the
high qualifications of the applicants, led to the well-known
result that six women and four minority male mission-special-
ist candidates were included in the “Thirty-Five New Guys”
(as they titled themselves). The bulk of the narrative is then
devoted to the selection process, the cultural problems of inte-
grating women astronauts into a rather unenlightened white-
male engineering world, and the practical engineering prob-
lems created by adapting equipment, spacesuits, toilets, etc.,
to differences in body size and biology. The latter sections are
Foster’s greatest strength, coming as she does from the histo-
ry of technology. What she does not cover are the often sexist
media images of the first women astronauts, focused as she is
on the internal NASA story.
As I noted, the book earlier devotes 66 pages to subjects
not nominally in the book, at least as defined by the subtitle.
This is less a problem of the book’s structure than simply of
the choice of subtitle. (If I may be forgiven a nitpick, her use
of the term “logistics” is also typical of current usage, in
which a military technical term for supply to armed forces in
the field has become vaguely applied to all kinds of things to
which it is not related.) The first chapter discusses the restric-
tions on pipeline occupations prior to the sixties that led to the
easy exclusion of women from the NASA astronaut corps, the
second covers the cultural images of women as spacefarers
from Buck Rogers to the multiple Star Trek television series,
and the third, as mentioned, the thwarting of any chance of
women astronauts being named in the 1960s. It is the second
chapter that seems the most out of place in this narrative, at
least when it is extended far beyond 1960. 
Foster concludes the book with a chapter noting the
unintended contradictions that the first women astronauts
found themselves in. They each strove to be “one of the guys,”
minimizing confrontation while working to eliminate all ves-
tiges of separate or special treatment. That was certainly the
approach that worked best in NASA. Yet they found them-
selves often using their special status as pioneering women to
INTEGRATING WOMEN INTO THE ASTRONAUT CORPS:
BOOK REVIEW
Politics and Logistics at NASA, 1972-2004
Q U E S T   19:2    2012
59
THE APOLLO GUIDANCE COMPUTER: ARCHITECTURE AND OPERATION
BOOK REVIEW
By Frank O’Brien 
Springer-Praxis, 2010
ISBN 978-1-4419-0876-6
Pages: 430
Price: $44.95, paperback
Frank O’Brien has written the most comprehensive and
detailed analysis of the workings of the Apollo guidance com-
puter that one could ever expect to have. It is not a book of his-
tory—for that I would recommend Eldon Hall’s Journey to the
Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer (Reston,
Virginia: AIAA, 1996). Likewise, readers wishing to learn how
the astronauts interacted with the machine during lunar mis-
sions can turn to David Mindell’s Digital Apollo: Human and
Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
This is a look “inside the black box” of the computer: its hard-
ware, memory, its interface with the crew, and above all, its
software. 
The book begins with a discussion of what computers
looked like in the early 1960s, when the AGC was taking form.
The author spends a lot of time on the decisions about the com-
puter’s “architecture.”  This is an interesting term as it is used
in the computer world: it refers to the overall organization of
hardware that directs the flow of data as the program instruc-
tions operate on it. It includes decisions how to handle nega-
tive numbers and perform subtraction, how to check for errors,
and above all, “word length”: how many bits does the proces-
sor handle at a time? Longer words mean greater numerical
precision with each operation, but they also can slow down the
machine and increase cost. The AGC used 14-bit words, plus
one bit for the sign, and one for “parity” checking—to ensure
that the data was not corrupt. Those of us who have followed
the evolution of personal computers from the days of the Apple
II know how word length has doubled, from the Apple’s 8-bits,
to the IBM PC’s 16, to current 32- and 64-bit words. In the cur-
rent computer world, the architecture is a commodity: it is
decided by the chip manufacturer (e.g. Intel), designed into a
chip called a microprocessor, then packaged and sold in a
rugged, inexpensive, and compact chip. It is not something that
many people worry about. That was not so in the 1960s, when
every facet of the processor was a matter of debate. 
After this discussion, the author moves on to what he
calls the “heart of the AGC”: the computer’s “Executive” pro-
gram. That is the program that allows the AGC to receive and
execute the applications programs for a mission’s guidance,
navigation, and control. It is similar to a modern operating sys-
tem, only much more tailored for a spaceflight with a lot more
emphasis on real-time execution, recovery from errors, low
memory requirements, and speed. Once again, most of us are
familiar with operating systems such as Windows or the older
MS-DOS, without which a computer could not do the work we
want it to do, such as word processing or a spreadsheet. It is a
necessary evil, and writing such a program can be one of the
blackest of black arts. Like the previous chapters on hardware,
this discussion reveals how much thought, hard work, and
genius went into making the computer a success. 
` These chapters are followed by a discussion of the basic
guidance and navigation problems faced by a mission to the
Moon, the applications programs that carried out these func-
tions, and by a discussion of how the astronauts operated the
computer through its Display and Keyboard—the “DSKY.”
The book is extensively illustrated, with a detailed glossary
and several appendixes. Those without at least a basic familiar-
ity with computer architecture and programming may find the
book tough going, but it ought to remain the standard reference
on this most remarkable machine.
Paul Ceruzzi
Division of Space History
National Air and Space Museum
Washington, DC 
advance their causes or careers after they left the job. Sally
Ride is the most notable example of this in her efforts to
deploy her fame as the first American woman in space to
encourage girls to take technical careers seriously. Almost no
one would take issue with that now, but it is ironic when at the
time of her first launch Ride strove, inevitably unsuccessfully,
to be perceived not as a woman, but just another member of
the crew. 
In sum, Amy Foster’s Integrating Women into the
Astronaut Corps is a valuable monograph on an important
topic. The small flaws do not detract from this fundamentally
well-written, well-researched narrative. It will provide a foun-
dation for much more scholarship to come on the astronaut
corps and NASA after Apollo.
Michael J. Neufeld 
National Air and Space Museum 
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC