(http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a24429/hidden-figures-real-story-nasa-women-computers/)
There's a moment halfway into Hidden Figures
when head NASA engineer Paul Stafford refuses the request of Katherine
Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) to attend an editorial meeting about John
Glenn's upcoming mission to become the first American to orbit the
Earth. Stafford's response is dismissive—"There's no protocol for women
attending." Johnson replies, "There's no protocol for a man circling
Earth either, sir."
The
quote underlines this based-on-a-true-story movie. For NASA to get John
Glenn into space and home safely, institutions that supported
prejudices and biases needed to start tumbling down. All hands (and
brains) had to be on deck.
Adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race,
the film focuses on three real-life African-American female pioneers:
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were part of
NASA's team of human "computers." This was a group made up of mostly
women who calculated by hand the complex equations that allowed space
heroes like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, and Glenn
to travel safely to space. Through sheer tenacity, force of will, and
intellect, they ensured their stamp on American history—even if their
story has remained obscured from public view until now.
A Large Capacity for Tedium
Women
working as so-called "human computers" dates back decades before space
exploration. In the late 19th century, the Harvard College Observatory
employed a group of women who collected, studied, and cataloged
thousands of images of stars on glass plates. As chronicled in Dava Sobel's book The Glass Universe, these women were every bit as capable as men despite toiling under less-than-favorable conditions. Williamina Fleming, for instance, classified over 10,000 stars using a scheme she created and was the first to recognize the existence of white dwarfs.
While working six-day weeks at a job demanding "a large capacity for
tedium," they were still expected to uphold societal norms of being a
good wife and mother.
In 1935, the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a precursor to NASA) hired five women to be their first computer pool
at the Langley campus. "The women were meticulous and accurate... and
they didn't have to pay them very much," NASA's historian Bill Barry
says, explaining the NACA's decision. In June 1941, with war raging in
Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt looked to ensure the growth of the
federal workforce. First he issued Executive Order 8802,
which banned "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national
origin" (though it does not include gender). Six months later, after the
attack on Pearl Harbor
brought the U.S. into the throes of war, NACA and Langley began
recruiting African-American women with college degrees to work as human
computers.
While
they did the same work as their white counterparts, African-American
computers were paid less and relegated to the segregated west section of
the Langley campus, where they had to use separate dining and bathroom
facilities. They became known as the "West Computers." Despite having
the same education, they had to retake college courses they had already
passed and were often never considered for promotions or other jobs
within NACA. Hidden Figures
depicts this in a scene in which "computer" Mary Jackson is asked if
she's want to be an engineer if she were a white man. Jackson responds,
"I wouldn't have too. I would already be one."
Katherine Johnson, the
movie's protagonist, was something of a child prodigy. Hailing from the
small West Virginian town of White Sulphur Springs, she graduated from
high school at 14 and the historically black West Virginia State University at 18. In 1938, as a graduate student, she became one of three students—and the only woman—to desegregate West Virginia's state college. In 1953, Johnson was hired by NACA and, five years later, NACA became NASA thanks to the Space Act of 1958.
The movie muddies the timeline a bit, but Johnson's first big NASA assignment was computing the trajectories for Alan Shepard's historic flight in 1961.
Johnson and her team's job was to trace out in extreme detail Freedom
7's exact path from liftoff to splashdown. Since it was designed to be a
ballistic flight—in that, it was like a bullet from a gun with a
capsule going up and coming down in a big parabola—it was relatively
simple in least in the context of what was to come. Nonetheless, it was a
huge success and NASA immediately set their sights on America's first
orbital mission.
The film primarily
focuses on John Glenn's 1962 trip around the globe and does add dramatic
flourishes that are, well, Hollywood. However, most of the events in
the movie are historically accurate. Johnson's main job in the lead-up
and during the mission was to double-check and reverse engineer the
newly-installed IBM 7090s trajectory calculations. As it shows, there
were very tense moments during the flight
that forced the mission to end earlier than expected. And John Glenn
did request that Johnson specifically check and confirm trajectories and
entry points that the IBM spat out (albeit, perhaps, not at the exact
moment that the movie depicts). As Shetterly wrote in her book and
explained in a September NPR interview,
Glenn did not completely trust the computer. So, he asked the head
engineers to "get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the
numbers are good... I'm ready to go."
While Johnson is the main character, Hidden Figures
also follows the trajectories of Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson as
they work on the Friendship Seven blast-off. Vaughan (Octavia Spencer)
was one of NACA's early computer hires during World War II. She became a
leader and advocate for the "West Computers." In 1948, she became NACA's first black supervisor and, later, an expert FORTRAN programmer.
Despite these successes and her capability, she was constantly passed over for promotions herself. As Spencer tells Popular Mechanics,
Vaughan struggled with the same things all female computers did while
at NASA. "The conflict of working outside of the home to provide the
best life for your children and, yet, not physically being there. But
she knew she was changing the world."
While
Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is also considered a "hidden figure," she
certainly stood out during her time at NASA. After graduating with dual
degrees in math and physical science, she was hired to work at Langley
in 1951. After several years as a computer, Jackson took an assignment
in assisting senior aeronautical research engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki
and he encouraged her to become an engineer herself. To do that,
however, she needed to take after-work graduate courses held at
segregated Hampton High School. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton
to be able to learn next to her white peers. She won, completed the
courses, and was promoted to engineer in 1958, making her NASA's first
African-American female engineer—and, perhaps, the only one for much of
her career.
John Glenn
While
these three women's stories remain front and center, John Glenn's
recent death makes this film particularly timely. Featured prominently,
Glenn is depicted as a goal-oriented, joke-making, tension-cutting,
folksy, equal opportunist. According to Barry, that's pretty much
exactly how he was.
"Everybody
thinks of John Glenn as this iconic war hero... and astronaut, but
what's missed a lot is his humanity," says Berry, "Glenn was in a,
classic sense, a gentleman. He was always concerned about the people
around him and it didn't matter what package they were in. He was a real
people person."
Barry
also notes that there's an "easter egg" in the film that most people
who aren't deep into NASA history will not catch. There's a short scene
where Glenn is talking to reporters, and beside him there's a woman—Cece Bibby—painting
the Friendship Seven logo onto the spacecraft. The true story is that
NASA officials originally did not allow Bibby access to the launch pad,
but Glenn intervened and insisted that his artist be allowed to do her
job.
Another Day's Work
There's no way a two-hour movie could tell the full story of these women; Shetterly's book paints a much fuller picture. But Hidden Figures
highlights NASA's (relatively) progressive attitude for the time,
driven in large part by necessity. This happens literally in the film,
when the head of the Space Task Group, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner)
destroys the "colored ladies room" bathroom sign. As Shetterly says to Popular Mechanics, the movie also focuses on Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughn's "transcendent sense of humanity" that allowed them to endure.
Johnson
would go on to work on the Apollo program, too, including performing
trajectory calculations that assisted the 1969 moon landing. She would
retire from NASA in 1986. In 2015, President Obama gave Katherine
Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Last May, a NASA computational research facility in her hometown of Hampton, Virginia was named in Johnson's honor.
And yet, despite the accolades and getting the Hollywood treatment, she
told the audience in May that she was just doing her job and "it was
just another day's work."
Sometimes changing the world is just that.
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