Ramona Carrasco never imagined that the cable of more than 30 meters on which she worked at the age of 16, with so much dedication and care for three months, would serve as a test for the Apollo Program ships designed by NASA to take humans to the Moon and return them safely.
“When they tested it and all the little lights on the cable turned green, indicating that everything was fine, and I saw the engineers hugging each other, I felt confused,” she says.
Ramona, an immigrant born in Sinaloa, Mexico, who emigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 14, did not understand the magnitude of what she had built with her own hands, alone and sitting on the floor of a warehouse in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.
“I found that job through a temporary employment agency.”
After nine previous candidates failed to pass the interview, Ramona was the tenth, and the one who took the job and finished it.
“When my boss, Engineer Jim, came up to me and asked how I was feeling, I told him I was confused,” she recalls.
In reality, the teenager didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, so much food and bottles of wine. The metal doors of the cellars had been thrown open.
“There were waiters with bow ties and towels on their arms; and three large trucks arrived from which they unloaded a lot of equipment; also three limousines, from one of which a man with black glasses got out carrying a briefcase held in his hand with a handcuff. Later I realized that it was full of money that he gave to the engineer.”
A day before, Ramona had finished assembling the cable, and had tested it twice so that everything looked good according to the instructions she had been given.
“The engineer asked me to check it one more time, I told him that I had already done it twice, that everything was ready, and if for some reason something didn’t work, it was no longer my mistake, but the document’s.”
At the time of testing the cable, and ordering it to be turned on, Ramona thought to herself, “let everything be fine, let nothing fail.”
And so it was, nothing failed. The jellyfish As Ramona calls the cable she created with thousands of wires inside, it was a success.
Ramona had no idea of the magnitude of her creation.
“It is very fair that you know that what you manufactured will serve to test that all the electronic parts of a rocket that the United States is going to send to the moon work.”
Ramona says she was paid $10 an hour to do the cable. I worked like an ant 8 hours a day.
“Technology good money in 1968”, but perhaps too little to be a test cable for the Apollo spacecraft.
It was a very challenging, mathematical job, he says; but in the midst of her difficulty, the young girl enjoyed it.
“I was always pulling wire, and I never asked what generation it was for. It just seemed strange to me. They opened the warehouse to build that cable, and I worked alone making it; only the first few days, the engineer came to see how it was going; then he let me do the work.”
From that cable, Ramona dedicated her life to working in electronics. In February 2000 he opened his own business, and in 2022 he retired.
She says she dedicated herself to electronics because she didn’t have the opportunity to go to university as she would have liked.
But she found refuge and success in electronics, a field dominated by men and where machismo reigned.
“On one occasion, when I worked for a company that is dedicated to making ceiling lamps that do not produce heat, I went to San Diego to buy equipment; I had an appointment at one in the afternoon at the company, and it was past 2 and 3 and the engineer did not attend to me,” he says.
When she was already frustrated, she asked the receptionist what was happening, and just then a man walked by and listened to her.
“Excuse us, but we are waiting for your husband or the salesperson to arrive to assist you. Isn’t there a man coming to help you?” the employee told her.
To which Ramona replied, “I didn’t make an appointment with my husband or any salesperson. I’m the one who’s going to decide.”
Again, they apologized and accepted that they were not helping her, because they had never seen a woman come alone to buy equipment.
At the same time, she was weaving cable in her adolescence, Ramona was a victim of abuse in her social environment, but she has reserved that part of her story to tell in the book A Cable to the Moon (A Cable to the Moon) written by Guillermo Wightman, journalism graduate from California State University at Northridge.
Ramona told her best friend, the Colombian Fernanda Otalora, about the cable, and when at a family meeting, Guillermo heard her, he thought that this story could not remain in the trunk of memories.
Guillermo, who is passionate about space issues, was surprised how a young Latina, without being an engineer, did an impeccable job building a ground test harness for NASA’s Verification and Acceptance Team, known as ACE, the system used to verify the systems of the Apollo spacecraft before launch.
“I have a full-time job at a systemic engineering company, a family, kids. So I’ve been working nights for the last three and a half years, writing the Ramona book — and it’s done.”
Guillermo has launched a Kickstarter campaign to A Cable to the Moonher narrative nonfiction book that traces Ramona’s entire life: from her childhood in Mexico, her crossing to the United States, the abuse and instability she survived as a teenager, to the precision electronics work that placed her within the Apollo program, and beyond.
“The campaign seeks funding for the final edition, apt review, design and publication,” explains the author.
“The book isn’t just about the cable. It’s about what Ramona did with the rest of her life. How she built a professional career. How she kept a secret for decades without seeking recognition, and what it means that such an extraordinary story lived inside a woman.”
And one of the most incredible things in his life was discovering that a close family friend, whom he had seen at countless family parties over the years, was connected to the space race.
The campaign, he says, is launched at a time when direct witnesses of the Apollo generation are disappearing. “Ramona is one of the survivors because she was very young when she made the cable.”
Today he is 73 years old.
“As NASA’s Artemis II mission marks the first crewed flight around the moon in 50 years, A Cable to the Moon looks back, towards Apollo, to recover one of the human stories that remained in the shadows of that first great leap,” says Guillermo.
To help Ramona’s book see the light of day, you can support with donations here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acabletothemoon/a-cable-to-the-moon-the-immigrant-teen-in the inspire of-apollo-11
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