Ms Granville and our Moonshot

livemint.com:

(https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/opinion-chandrayaan-2-last-15-minutes-are-the-longest-1564069569286.html). But its orbits get more and more elliptical, and Chandrayaan ranges further and further from its home planet, until it effectively slips out of the Earth’s gravitational grasp and, slingshot style, is dispatched towards the Moon. At some point, the Moon’s gravity will “capture" Chandrayaan.

Then it will start orbiting the Moon, getting less and less elliptical with each orbit. Eventually, the mission will attempt a landing on the Moon. That’s the operation that failed in 2019.

That’s what millions of us hope will work to perfection this time. We will know, of course, in about a month. It’s not that I mean to reduce a complex, intricate mission to just a few phrases in this column.

My column from 2019 speaks of these manoeuvres in more detail. Here, I’d like to use the excitement and anticipation about Chandrayaan to pay tribute to a woman who died a few days ago, who had nothing to do with Chandrayaan, except obliquely. In 1956, IBM recruited Evelyn Boyd Granville, among the earliest Black women to earn a mathematics PhD in the US.

Soon after, she was assigned to IBM’s collaboration with NASA on space missions. By 1962, she was working on the Mercury programme, which would carry John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Granville’s job was to write programmes that calculated various parameters for the mission.

And what were these calculations? I don’t know exactly, of course, but let’s take a look at some calculations that spaceflight requires—the kind that Granville must have been working on. To start, we’re talking about a spacecraft orbiting the Earth. Why does that have to happen out in space,