

Nathalia Holt spoke with NPR’s Ari Shapiro and one of the original “rocket girls,” Barbara Paulson, about women’s role in shaping the American space project. Nathalia’s book The Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, is a collective biography of a group of women who “did the math” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1940s.