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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

West Computing no longer existed as a physical space, but its alumni pushed their minds and hands in the service of the space program—though in Dorothy Vaughan’s case, it was an indirect effort. The computer minders of the two IBM 7090s being used to track the flight were ensconced at Goddard, and much of the analysis was being done in the Space Task Group’s Mission Planning Analysis Division. The women and men in ACD were as busy as ever, however. Dorothy’s hunch that those who knew how to program the devices wouldn’t want for work was a correct one. Though she wasn’t on the front lines of the programming that was being done for Project Mercury, she did have a hand in the calculations that were used in Project Scout, a solid-fuel rocket that Langley tested at the Wallops Island facility. She had even been making trips up to the test range for work. The Scout rocket had been an important part of laying the groundwork for the manned spaceflight efforts. Engineers used it to take a “dummy” astronaut, weighing as much as a real astronaut, for a four-orbit flight in November 1961.