She helped to bring astronauts home safely

@Mark Ollig

I recently read the Nov. 14, 2018, NASA Johnson Space Center oral history interview of Frances Marian “Poppy” Northcutt by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.

The interview provides a detailed account of her work on the Apollo program and her experience as the first woman to serve in an engineering role in NASA’s Mission Control.

Northcutt, born Aug. 10, 1943, shares that her older brother gave her the nickname “Poppy” from a favorite Little Golden Book fairy tale he read.

Northcutt studied mathematics at the University of Texas and later earned a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center.

A job referral led her to TRW Systems, a NASA contractor in Houston, TX, where she started as a “computress,” handling data analysis and programming.

Northcutt noted similarities between her experience and that of the women mathematicians depicted in the 2016 book “Hidden Figures” and the film of the same name, which told the story of NASA’s early human computers.

Despite feeling intimidated by colleagues with advanced degrees from elite schools, she quickly proved her abilities and became a valuable team member within months.

Northcutt was part of the lunar return-to-Earth trajectory program, initially called the “abort program.”

Its main challenge was the three-body problem involving Earth, the moon, and the spacecraft.

Unlike returns from Earth orbit, coming home from the moon meant linking several curved trajectory segments, switching between Earth’s and the moon’s gravity, and relying on powerful computers to map the way back.

She noted that lunar return calculations could not be done with slide rules alone and required repeated mainframe computer processing power.

Northcutt worked on reverse-engineering the trajectory software to understand it fully.

Her team, usually consisting of three to eight members, focused on return-to-Earth analysis and developed a flexible program for various mission conditions, which replaced a competing trajectory program.

Northcutt’s mastery of the code set her apart and helped her advance quickly, as she supported the retrofire officers in the staff support room (SSR-1) during the Apollo 8 mission around the moon.

Apollo 8’s most dramatic moment came when the spacecraft passed behind the moon and communications were lost during the lunar orbit insertion burn.

The wait for the signal was stressful, as it determined whether the burn was successful or if the crew was on a crash course to the lunar surface.

Northcutt recalled the tense silence and countdown clock until the spacecraft finally responded, confirming it had successfully entered lunar orbit and traveled around the moon.

She remembered drawing widespread media attention as the first woman to serve in an engineering role inside NASA’s Mission Control during Apollo 8.

In the interview, Northcutt said the press treated her as a novelty and more as a spectacle than a professional.

She felt intense pressure to perform flawlessly, knowing any mistake could reinforce gender stereotypes.

Northcutt also faced systemic discrimination as an hourly employee, with wage‑hour rules limiting her pay even when she worked extra hours, until her supervisor fought to have her promoted from “computress” to “technical staff.”

While in Mission Control, she often felt under scrutiny, especially after she learned a hidden camera was broadcasting her image without her knowledge.

Northcutt had support from Mission Control officers like John Llewellyn, who valued her technical expertise.

She mentioned receiving fan letters and even marriage proposals from around the world, including notes addressed only to Poppy, Space Center, which still somehow found their way to her desk.

After the oxygen tank explosion aboard Apollo 13 April 13, 1970, Northcutt drew on her return‑to‑Earth trajectory work to help guide efforts to place the spacecraft back onto a free‑return path so it could loop around the moon, conserve as much fuel as possible, and slingshot home.

Mission Control adopted this strategy to conserve fuel and avoid the risks of a direct abort, which would have required untested maneuvers and much more fuel to be used with very little room for error.

She later noted that the most difficult work fell to the engineers struggling in real time to keep the environmental, life‑support, and power systems functioning.

Northcutt was part of the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team that received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for developing the emergency procedures that helped bring the crew home after the oxygen tank explosion.

After Apollo, she spent a short period working on space shuttle development before moving to California, where she contributed to TRW’s antiballistic missile defense programs.

Northcutt stayed involved in the broader aerospace world connected to NASA into the early 1970s.

The Apollo program concluded with Apollo 17 in December 1972.

“I’m just full of pride, not about myself so much . . . It is about the whole achievement, that it’s a teamwork,” Northcutt said during an Oct. 30, 2024, KTRK-TV interview in Houston.

“I mean, there’s nothing, there’s no bigger team than that in terms of that kind of enterprise. So just a lot of pride about the accomplishments of that team in doing what President Kennedy challenged us to do. And then we actually did it,” she said.

Reflecting on her greatest accomplishment, Northcutt stated, “We never lost a customer. They all came home.”

Northcutt, now 82, is recognized in NASA’s oral history as the first woman to work as an engineer in Mission Control.

Her work played an important role in helping to bring astronauts home safely.

The full edited transcript of Northcutt’s interview is available on NASA’s website at this shortened link: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/northcuttfm-11-14-18.pdf?emrc=8a7b05

Astroflies: First living beings to reach space

@Mark Ollig

In August 1945, German-made V-2 rockets and their parts were brought to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2 (“Vengeance Weapon 2”), was the world’s first rocket-powered ballistic missile, standing 46 feet tall and weighing nearly 28,000 pounds when fully fueled.

Developed at Peenemünde in northeastern Germany by a team led by Wernher von Braun, it first flew successfully Oct. 3, 1942, and became operational in 1944.

Equipped with an internal guidance system, this supersonic weapon had a flight range of roughly 200 miles and carried an explosive warhead of about 2,200 pounds.

The V-2 plunged toward its target at around 3,400 mph.

For those curious, the V-1 (Vergeltungswaffe 1), aka “buzz bomb,” was the world’s first operational cruise missile.

Designed under engineer Robert Lusser at Fieseler, it entered service in June 1944, with a flight range of about 160 miles.

The V-1 carried a roughly 1,870-pound high-explosive warhead, and typically flew at close to 400 mph toward its target before diving in.

After WWII, the United States acquired V-2 rockets, parts, and technical documentation, shipping about 300 freight-car loads of components to the new White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.

There, under Project Hermes, Army teams and General Electric personnel inventoried, reworked, assembled, modified, and launched V-2s for military testing and high-altitude scientific research.

In early 1946, a plan developed by Harvard University and the US Naval Research Laboratory was selected to send life from Earth into space aboard a V-2 rocket.

The V-2 flight that carried the first living animals into space was V-2 No. 20, also known as the Blossom 1 mission.

It launched from White Sands Missile Range’s Launch Complex 33 Feb. 20, 1947, under US Army oversight.

Those first living animals from Earth to reach space and return alive were . . . drum roll . . . fruit flies (yes, I was surprised too).

Fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, may seem like pesky insects, but they are highly valuable for scientific research.

Scientists chose them for early spaceflights because their genetics are well-mapped, including four pairs of chromosomes, which made it easier to spot radiation-related changes after recovery.

Their rapid life cycle allows researchers to study radiation effects in both the original spacefaring fruit flies and their offspring.

By the 1940s, fruit flies were already essential to genetics research, making them a practical choice for early biological experiments.

Scientists wanted to know whether living organisms could survive exposure to radiation at very high altitudes and the violent forces of a rocket launch before humans attempted space flight.

Along with fruit flies, the V-2 payload carried plant material like corn and other seeds to track visible genetic mutations in future generations.

It also included extra seeds so scientists could study whether radiation might impact the quality of future crops.

This allowed researchers to compare the effects on both animal and plant life during the same flight.

Fruit flies were placed in an ejectable metal canister built to protect them during the V-2 flight.

This payload canister kept the insects safe from the vacuum, extreme pressure shifts, and mechanical forces during ascent, the short time at peak altitude, and the descent.

The Blossom 1 V-2 rocket reached space Feb. 20, 1947, climbing to about 68 miles above Earth in roughly three minutes, 10 seconds.

That altitude placed the rocket roughly six miles above the commonly cited 62-mile Kármán line.

Near its peak altitude, the rocket ejected the recoverable payload canister carrying the fruit flies, which I’ve nicknamed “astroflies.”

As the payload canister began its descent, a small ribbon parachute deployed first to absorb the initial deceleration and aerodynamic shock and to stabilize it in the thin upper atmosphere.

A larger parachute then opened at about 30 miles for the remainder of the descent.

Army documentation from White Sands states that the payload canister “descended for 50 minutes and, with the aid of radar, was recovered immediately.”

Using a two-stage parachute system, it drifted slowly through the thin upper atmosphere before continuing its gradual descent as the air grew thicker, making the return last about 50 minutes.

“The parachute was ejected and functioned perfectly,” Commanding Officer Lt. Col. Harold R. Turner later said.

After recovery of the payload canister, the fruit flies were examined and scientists assessed possible radiation effects.

“Analysis made by Harvard on recovered seeds and flies has shown that no detectable changes are produced by the radiation,” wrote US Naval Research Laboratory nuclear physicist Ernst H. Krause.

The flight proved that living organisms could survive a rocket launch, reach space, and return safely to Earth.

At the time, some scientists feared acceleration, vibration, or radiation might make survival impossible for living organisms during a space flight.

In 1947, fruit flies answered one important question: Could life leave Earth, reach space, and come back alive?

We learned the answer was yes.

Today, NASA continues to send fruit flies to the International Space Station for testing and observation, exploring how space affects biology over time.

NASA notes that fruit flies share many fundamental genetic and cellular characteristics with humans, with approximately 75% of human disease genes having counterparts in fruit flies.

This makes them a small yet efficient model for studying changes related to the immune system, heart function, and other bodily systems in space.

Let’s pause to acknowledge those spacefaring “astroflies,” the first living beings to journey into space and return alive.

How frequency modulation conquered static

@Mark Ollig 

In the 1920s, radio evolved from small experiments into a powerful new medium for sharing information and entertainment wirelessly across America.

Westinghouse station 8ZZ in Pittsburgh, the direct predecessor of KDKA, broadcast live the results of Warren G. Harding’s presidential win over James M. Cox at about 545 kHz Nov. 2, 1920, before newspapers could report them.

The station aired the first Major League Baseball play-by-play broadcast from Forbes Field in Pittsburgh Aug. 5, 1921, using a telephone as a microphone; in case you were interested, the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Philadelphia Phillies 8 to 5.

According to a Feb. 12, 1922, article in the New Jersey Trenton Sunday Times-Advertiser, “President Harding is the latest notable wireless fan,” noting that “a radio phone has been placed in the presidential study in the White House.”

“The President proposes to make excellent use of the wireless and is planning to give some part of each of his busy days to listening-in. A radiophone is also to be installed in the press room in the White House,” the article stated.

WLAG in Minneapolis began broadcasting Sept. 4, 1922, at 720 kHz.

It was acquired by Washburn‑Crosby Co. and became WCCO Oct. 2, 1924.

WCCO moved to 810 kHz in 1928 and transmitted at 50,000 watts by September 1932, reaching much of the Upper Midwest.

In 1941, it transferred to 830 kHz and was long promoted as “the station that serves the nation.”

Nationally, radio saw the launch of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in 1926 and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1927.

Radio owes much to Edwin Howard Armstrong, an American electrical engineer and inventor born Dec. 18, 1890, in New York City.

Armstrong was fascinated by gadgets from a young age, building a homemade antenna tower and conducting electrical experiments.

In 1912, while studying at Columbia University, Armstrong discovered that feeding some of a radio tube’s output back into its input could make weak signals regenerate into much stronger ones.

In 1914, his regeneration design obtained US Patent 1,113,149, titled “Wireless receiving system.”

However, Lee de Forest, an American inventor and electrical engineer, had patented the Audion tube in 1907, and claimed it was the same basic idea as Armstrong’s, and so he should not own the rights or collect any royalties.

This argument over who really invented regeneration in a circuit ended in 1934 when the US Supreme Court sided with de Forest.

Many engineers believed Armstrong was the one who had actually turned regeneration into a practical, working radio circuit.

In 1918, while serving in the US. Army Signal Corps during World War I, Edwin Howard Armstrong developed the superheterodyne receiver.

His design mixed the incoming station signal with a locally generated signal and shifted the result to a fixed intermediate frequency that was easier to amplify and filter.

After amplification at that intermediate frequency, the receiver recovered the audio signal.

This approach produced clearer voices and music with less “bleed-over” from nearby stations, and it remains the basic architecture of most modern radio, television, radar, and cellular receivers.

Starting in the 1920s, home radios tuned into AM stations, typically from about 550 to 1,500 kHz, until the AM band was extended to 1,600 kHz in 1941.

In the early 1930s, Armstrong engineered wide-band frequency modulation, or FM, which changed the signal’s frequency rather than its amplitude, making it much less susceptible to electrical noise.

He tested the system at extremely high frequencies and launched the experimental station W2XMN in Alpine, NJ.

Assigned 42.8 MHz (megahertz) in 1938, the station began regular broadcasts in 1939, demonstrating that FM could deliver high-fidelity sound far superior to AM.

Minnesota engineers soon joined this high-frequency frontier.

In 1939, Minneapolis station W9XHW operated at 42.30 MHz with 50 watts from the Nicollet Hotel.

W9XHW was an experimental “Apex” station using amplitude modulation (AM) on very high radio frequencies above the standard AM band to provide wide audio bandwidth and higher‑fidelity sound.

Because it still relied on AM, it remained vulnerable to lightning and man‑made static, letting engineers see how Armstrong’s FM system improved on earlier high‑frequency AM.

Some Twin Cities broadcasters were also testing Apex signals.

KSTP’s high-frequency station W9XUP began “ultra-short-wave” Apex tests in 1938 at 25.95 MHz, then shifted to 26.15 MHz in 1939.

WTCN’s W9XTC, active in 1939, operated as an experimental FM transmitter on 26.05 MHz.

The Apex era of experimentation effectively ended when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the Apex band Jan. 1, 1941, reallocating its spectrum to the new FM broadcast band.

The FCC then used those former Apex channels to launch the first commercial FM band from 42 to 50 megahertz, replacing high‑frequency AM with Armstrong’s new static‑resistant system.

In March 1941, Nashville’s W47NV went on the air at 44.7 MHz as the first licensed commercial FM station in the United States.

In June 1945, the FCC moved FM broadcasting from 42 to 50 MHz up to 88 to106 MHz.

The band was expanded again in 1946 to 88 to 108 megahertz.

The change disrupted many early FM stations, including Armstrong’s, but the core technology adjusted to the new allocation and eventually became the standard for high-quality broadcasting.

FM radio faced strong opposition from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the AM radio establishment, which saw it as a threat to their existing investments.

In 1940, RCA offered Armstrong $1 million for a nonexclusive license to his FM patents with no royalties.

He refused, insisting that RCA pay royalties as other licensees did.

Years of lawsuits followed, with RCA President David Sarnoff applying financial and legal pressure while Armstrong fought to defend his work and reputation.

The struggle took a heavy toll on Armstrong, and by the early 1950s, he was financially strained and physically exhausted.

Edwin Howard Armstrong, at the age of 63, took his own life in New York City, NY Feb. 1, 1954.

His wife, Marion, carried on the litigation, securing several important settlements, including a significant deal with RCA.

In 1983, the US Postal Service paid tribute to Edwin Howard Armstrong with a 20-cent commemorative stamp featuring his portrait alongside an illustration of his frequency modulation invention.

Farmers used barbed wire fences as phone lines

@Mark Ollig

During the 1880s and 1890s, most rural areas in Minnesota lacked commercial telephone service.

Bell, the national organization named for inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and other companies mainly served larger towns, leaving farmers without service.

In Minnesota, its Bell-licensed operating company was the Northwestern Telephone Exchange Company, incorporated in Minneapolis in 1878.

Farms were often miles from the nearest exchange, and pole lines across open land were costly to build and maintain, so commercial telephone companies commonly delayed rural service.

By the 1880s and 1890s, farmers in southern and western Minnesota had already installed miles of galvanized steel barbed wire fencing to manage their livestock.

Farmers realized the metal in their fences could carry electrical current, which sparked a creative idea.

They used these fences as improvised telephone lines, letting farmers talk with neighbors from their homes.

Many sources called them fence line telephone systems, which used a single-wire earth-return circuit, with the barbed wire serving as the line conductor.

A copper lead-in wire ran from the telephone’s L1 terminal and was clamped to the fence’s top strand.

The return path for speech and ringing current was the ground.

A second wire ran from the telephone’s L2 terminal to a ground rod, often an iron rod driven into the soil.

When you talked, current left your telephone, traveled along the fence to your neighbor’s telephone, went into their ground connection, passed through the earth, and returned through your ground rod to complete the circuit.

The fence line acted as a single conductor, carrying speech or ringing current, powered during conversation by dry-cell batteries inside the telephone or a nearby external battery box.

To place a call, the user turned a hand crank, generating a brief burst of higher-voltage alternating current from the magneto that rang the bells on every telephone connected to the line.

In some cases, as many as 20 telephones shared a single fence line circuit, so every party-line bell rang when someone called, unless neighbors used agreed-upon ring codes.

Insulators included glass bottle necks, leather straps, rubber hose pieces, or even corn cobs, used to keep the wire from touching damp wooden fence posts and leaking electricity.

These homebuilt telephone systems created party lines that connected neighbors over long distances, allowing them to share news, organize farm work, and call for help in emergencies.

A Minnesota newspaper offered a detailed look at how fence line telephony worked.

The Freeborn County Times of Albert Lea published an article Aug. 31, 1900, describing how people were turning fence lines into working telephone lines.

The article explained that barbed wire fences were being used as conductors, allowing farmers to build low-cost telephone systems without erecting traditional pole lines.

It described a system in which the top strand of the fence line served as the main line, with insulation improvised at fence posts and crossings to prevent electrical leakage.

The paper reported that the fence line system extended about 15 miles and had been in operation since late December, with only brief interruptions, including one caused when a cow broke the wire after being struck by a train.

It said the entire line was built for less than $100, and that the telephone outfit itself cost no more than $10, highlighting how inexpensive these systems could be.

These fence line systems typically used wall-mounted, hand-cranked magneto telephones, the standard rural instruments of the era.

Dry-cell batteries inside the telephone supplied low-voltage direct current to the carbon transmitter for talking, while turning the hand crank generated a brief burst of higher-voltage alternating current to ring the bells on other phones sharing the line.

Because ground conditions affected signal quality, farmers learned that wet soil improved performance, while dry ground could weaken it, and some even joked that it was “time to go out and water the grounding rod.”

Barbed wire isn’t the best medium for carrying sound, as voice quality fades over longer distances and during storms, and calls often contained some noise.

Even with these quirks, fence line telephones were still an important way for rural farms to stay connected.

Fence line telephones made it easier to get help with farm equipment, report fires, call for medical aid, share weather updates, and chat across miles of farmland in the evenings.

Linking farms along property lines, they formed local networks that served rural communities.

These homemade telephone systems brought basic communication to rural areas long before commercial telephone service reached many Minnesota farms.

By the early 1900s, fence line systems drew the attention of state lawmakers.

The St. Paul Globe reported Feb. 26, 1903, on two Minnesota House bills designed to settle disputes over fence line telephone connections.

The article said the bills were introduced by Rep. Charles H. Klein of District 25, representing Carver County, and Rep. Jacob D. Schroeder of District 14, representing Jackson County.

The proposals reflected growing pressure from rural users pushing back against Bell-affiliated telephone companies.

While both bills failed, the debate made clear that by 1903, farmers were making fence line telephone service a viable mode of communication in rural Minnesota.

An article in the Park Rapids Enterprise reported March 21, 1912, that Minnesota collected $163,052.28 in gross earnings taxes from 695 telephone companies in 1911.

Taxes ranged from 12 cents to $70,059.63.

The Carlisle Barbed Wire Telephone Company was highlighted for using fence lines instead of poles, paying 87 cents in taxes.

This shows that even fence line telephone systems were treated as taxable telephone operations under Minnesota law.

As the federal Rural Electrification Administration (REA) financed new power lines across the countryside in the late 1930s and 1940s, grounded distribution circuits often ran near older, single-wire, earth-return farm telephone fence lines.

That closeness let 60-cycle power fields (and their harmonics) couple into those fence line circuits, adding a loud hum that could make conversations extremely difficult.

Farmers began switching from fence line networks to telephone cooperatives or independent company networks, which provided clearer calls, fewer disruptions, better privacy, and connections to more people within Minnesota and other states’ networks.

Long before digital transmissions, fiber optics, and cell towers, the story of rural telecommunications in Minnesota was shaped by farmers who transformed barbed wire fences into makeshift telephone lines.