Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

by Margot Lee Shetterly

But she also knew that the best thing about breaking a barrier was that it would never have to be broken again.

A Republican senator from Pennsylvania called the Mercury capsule-Atlas rocket pairing “a Rube Goldberg device on top of a plumber’s nightmare.”

Katherine Johnson’s life had always seemed to be guided by a kind of providence, one that was unseen by others and not fully understood by her, perhaps, but obeyed by all who knew her, the way one obeys the laws of physics.

“What I changed, I could; what I couldn’t, I endured,” Dorothy Vaughan told historian Beverly Golemba in 1992.