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NASA JOHNSON SPACE CENTER ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

SHIRLEY HUNT HINSON INTERVIEWED BY REBECCA WRIGHT LOUISBURG, NORTH CAROLINA ? 2 MAY 2000

WRIGHT: Today is May 2, 2000. This oral history is being conducted with Shirley Hunt Hinson in Louisburg, North Carolina, as part of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Kevin Rusnak.

We want to thank you again for allowing us in your home and having this opportunity to visit with you. You spent numerous years as part of America's space program, and your contributions were so many. Tell us how you first became involved in working with NASA.

HINSON: When I graduated from college, it was in 1958. I went to college, started in September of 1955. I graduated in May of `58, which was two years and nine months, with a degree in math and a minor in science. I lacked one hour in having a double major. The main reason I majored in math was because it was easy. I mean, why do you major in things? The other reason is I decided that if I married someone locally and I got stuck in a little dinky town, I could always teach math. But if not, maybe I could get out of Franklin County [North Carolina] and go somewhere and work for real.

So the week before I graduated, my professor asked me would I like to have a teaching fellowship. I probably didn't even know what a teaching fellowship was, but I said, "What is it?" and he told me that I could teach one class each quarter, and they would pay me to get my master's. So I said, "Let me go home and ask Daddy."

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So after I graduated, I asked Daddy, "If I need any money, can you help me through school one more year?"

He says, "If that's what you want." So I went back to school one more year, and I ended up getting my master's in 1959. There were three people that had graduated from that math department that had gone to work at a place called Langley Research Center [Hampton, Virginia]. I heard they were making a lot more money than schoolteachers. At that time school teachers in North Carolina were making $2,999.99, one penny less than $3,000, and the government was offering $5,430. So I had nothing to keep me from going up there. So I wrote to ask them for an application blank. They wrote me back and said, "You can pick them up at the post office," to show you how much I knew. [Laughter] But anyway. I fill out an application, and they wrote me back and told me I was hired and that I could come to work on June 30th. So that's how I started work at NASA.

WRIGHT: How did your family take the fact that as a basically young single female that you were just going to pick up and move away from home with a brand-new job?

HINSON: My daddy was so proud of me, he couldn't see straight. I was the first girl--I had three sisters, no brothers, and I was the first one that had graduated from college, and he was very proud. The first thing, they asked if I minded moving to Greenbelt, Maryland, and I said, "No." They said, "Well, we will assign you then to the Space Task Group," because we were supposed to move to Greenbelt, Maryland. They were building a new facility up there which became Goddard, I think, but that's where Space Task Group [STG] was going, before

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[Speaker of the House] Sam [Samuel T.] Rayburn and [Senator] Lyndon [B.] Johnson came along. And I'm thankful because I like Texas a whole lot.

WRIGHT: Tell us about those first days going with your brand-new job, brand-new facilities. For you, what was it like those first few days that you were there?

HINSON: I don't know. [Laughter] I was new. I had no car. I did find a new roommate through the placement area at Langley, and I was living with a girl who was working at the Unitary [Plan] wind tunnel, I think, was the name of the place. And I found a ride to work with people that were working on my side of the field. Space Task Group was on one side of the field, and Langley Research Center was on the other side of the field. I just found rides to work and just fell right into a great job, really a great job.

WRIGHT: What was your first role? What were you first assigned to do as part of that Space Task Group?

HINSON: The first thing I did was I walked into a room with about four other girls, or women, there. I think two of them had majored in math in college, and two of them were math aides. And then we had a little computer. This "little computer" was the size of a refrigerator. It was a Bendix G15, single instruction. Anything you wanted to do, you had to bring it into the register, do it, then store it. If you ever wanted to use it again, you had to remember where you stored it. So that was my first experience with a computer, and we

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were given a Freidan calculator. I had had a Monroe. I had never had a Freidan before, so I didn't know to run that, and they were different.

From there, they started bringing us these trajectories about this thick to plot, and just started working then. I think the first program I ever did was to transfer rotational velocity to inertial velocity and vice versa.

WRIGHT: Did you have any idea what you were working on in the beginning, or all this make sense based what you might have learned in some of your classes in college?

HINSON: Well, in some of my classes in school, I knew what I was doing, but I was not familiar with orbital mechanics and all that. I had to learn that on the job. I learned a lot on the job. I did have one professor in college who always was saying, "When you go to work, you will need this." So there was a lot that I knew, but the largeness of it--see, I'd never been next to an airplane before I went to Langley. I had never seen an airplane on the ground before I went to Langley. So it was a change for a little girl from North Carolina. But I had a good time. [Laughter]

I worked hard and learned a lot and dealt with some great people. We worked hard hours. Sometimes we didn't even know--eleven o'clock at night we'd go home, and we had a computer over in another building. I think it was a 704 that they would run trajectories on and they used us to debug their programs. They would bring them back, and we would plot. When I say plot, I mean by hand on a piece of graph paper. There was no computer that plotted for us, so we would plot everything that they would bring back. If it didn't look right, we'd look at the data and find out what was wrong with it and then they'd go change the

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parameter, rerun it, and we'd do something over again. So for all of the trajectories for Mercury, we basically debugged the programs by plotting and seeing what things looked like.

Then as we got closer to the missions, we would do all of the trajectory analysis reports and just the entire mission trajectory and the mission analysis reports we would do. The flight controllers would know everything that was supposed to be done. We plotted the big--I guess they were four-foot by four-foot projection plot boards that were at the Cape. We did all of that by hand on paper. They rolled them up, carried them down there, and put up on the projection plot boards.

WRIGHT: And it was you with a few other women, or did you have men that worked in this area as well?

HINSON: No, they were all women in that one area. We were not just women in that particular area; we were in the room with all the men. I mean, there was one long big room, and everybody was together. But they basically separated the women from the men as far as the work they did, although I did sort of creep out of my little math aide-type hole into the real world eventually. But it took me a while.

WRIGHT: Some of the management, or some of the other team members, that would bring you work to do, did they explain what they needed or did they basically leave this information for you to figure out on your own? How did they provide enough details for you to give them back what they needed?

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