Those well-heeled people had all responded to something in the young bespectacled woman, something that gave them the feeling that she had a great future. Who among them would have ever imagined, however, that Katherine’s future, and their country’s future, and the future, as imagined by the likes of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, would converge to be one and the same? Yet four days earlier, on July 16, 1969, fifty-year-old Katherine Johnson had been part of that group of insiders when the three-hundred-foot Saturn V rocket boosted the Apollo 11 craft and its three human occupants down the road
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