Salisbury WRE women crucial as computers tracking Woomera rocket tests and satellites in 1950s/60s

Women working as computers (with the mechanical versions) at the WRE Establishment, Salisbury, and (left) at Woomera rocket range in their required army uniforms and operating a kinetheodolite, around 1950.
Images courtesy Weapons Research Establishment

A group of female computers (maths calculators) was a vital part of South Australia’s ideal position to track the satellites that started the Cold War space race between the US and USSR after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957.

Based at the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE) at Salisbury, north of Adelaide, the South Australian female computers had worked at WRE from the late 1940s doing calculations for rocket tests at Woomera in South Australia’s far north.

Led by Mary Whitehead, the computers would make occastional visits to Woomera to watch the launches of rockets and missiles, and be trained in the data collection equipment — kinetheodolites, high-speed cine-cameras, radars, radio missile tracking systems, Doppler and telemetry reception equipment — to better interpret results when they got back to Salisbury.

These visits concerned the Woomera range superintendent, worried that the women were in moral danger in the male-dominated range village. The compromise was that the women wear army gear – hat, khaki shirt and slacks, heavy brogues and leather jerkins for cold weather. They ate in the officers’ mess, away from the lower ranks.

At Salisbury, the female computers had mechanical help in calculating with basic Friden and then Marchant machines, with the WRE getting its own custom-designed digital computer, the WREDAC (Weapons Research Establishment Digital Automatic Computer), in 1956. A Minitrak satellite tracking station and Baker-Nunn satellite tracking camera were set up in Woomera in 1957, starting a long association between Australia and the United States in space tracking.

Into the 1960s, the four women at Salisbury were still needed, under the Moonwatch program, to complement NASA information and predict the orbits for satellites passing over Australia at night. The used a Perspex sheet over a map of Australia to plot the orbits, then sent the information in code to the postmaster general’s department to be forwarded to NASA via telegram.

The role of Salisbury’s female computers was the same as those featured in the 2016 film Hidden Figures about Afro-American women working with NASA. Athough the Australian women didn’t have to cope with the extra layer of racism, they were still subject to inequality in pay and conditions.