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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

Flight Research’s cousins, a “notoriously freethinking” group of engineers called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division—PARD—had developed an expertise in rocketry, setting up an adjunct operation on an isolated test range on Wallops Island off the Virginia coast. Their rockets had reached speeds of Mach 15 in flight, and they were confident of their abilities to lift a payload—a satellite and a human passenger—into orbit.

Getting the chance to figure out how to send humans into space was fortune beyond measure. As she worked with the engineers to build a course from the warmth and safety of their home to the cold void beyond, Katherine Goble’s talents would truly take flight.

Physically, Dorothy and the West Computing office had never been closer to the high-speed future. As the laboratory embraced the onset of the space age, the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel would remain one of the busiest hubs of the center, testing “nearly every supersonic airplane, missile, and spacecraft” that saw the light of day over the next two decades. But in terms of the center’s computing operations, Dorothy’s pool now existed on the periphery.

Miriam Mann, Ophelia Taylor, Chubby Peddrew, and many others from West Computing’s class of 1943 had, like Katherine Goble and Mary Jackson, been offered permanent positions with engineering groups. Dorothy Vaughan was more likely to run into her former colleagues in the Langley cafeteria or the parking lot than to see them during the workday.

With East Area Computing gone, West Area Computing was boxed in on two fronts. Not only was the group all black, it was also the only stand-alone all-female professional section left at the laboratory, and by the late 1950s, that had become an anachronism. The black men, like Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams and Larry Brown, certainly had to spar with racial prejudice, but they started their Langley careers with all the privileges of being a male engineer. And although the lacunae of computing pools attached to PARD and Flight Research and the plethora of tunnels were also staffed and supervised by women, those women, including the newly integrated black computers, reported directly to researchers, and they were closely tethered to the work and the status of the male engineers whose spaces they shared. Like Virginia Tucker before her, Dorothy Vaughan now presided over an appendix, still attached to the research operation but whose function had attenuated over time.

Through the familiarity that came with regular contact, they had been able to establish themselves not as “the colored girls” but simply “the girls,” the ones engineers relied upon to swiftly and accurately translate the raw babble of the laboratory’s fierce machines into a language that could be analyzed and turned into a vehicle that cut through the sky with grace and power.

Claiming to be the front line of defense for the entire South and its “way of life,” the southern Democrats who ruled the state passed a package of laws that gave the legislature the right to close any public school that tried to integrate. “How can Senator Byrd and [Virginia] Congressman Hardy be so distressed one minute about our lagging behind the Russians in our missile program and the next minute advocate closing the schools in Virginia?” demanded one Norfolk Journal and Guide columnist.

“Eighty percent of the world’s population is colored,” the NACA’s chief legal counsel Paul Dembling had written in a 1956 file memo. “In trying to provide leadership in world events, it is necessary for this country to indicate to the world that we practice equality for all within this country. Those countries where colored persons constitute a majority should not be able to point to a double standard existing within the United States.”

As far as the segregationists were concerned, racial integration and Communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values. Yet those charged with mounting the American offense in space saw strength in countering the Russian value of secrecy with its opposites—transparency, democracy, equality—and not a simulacrum.

The NACA—civilian and innocuous, abundant in engineering talent—was the perfect container. In October 1958, with Mother Langley as the nucleus, the US government fused all the competing operations, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into the NACA. The expanded mission called for a new name: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

The work done by the NACA nuts was hidden behind the more public operations of the military services and commercial aircraft manufacturers. NASA was chartered “to provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities,” with all failures and tragedies of the endeavor laid bare to the citizenry and broadcast through the influential young medium of television. With the world watching, the new organization carrying the American banner into space would have to be “clean, technically perfect, and meritocratic, the bearer of a myth.”

As the Space Act of 1958 made its way through Congress, trailing behind it the sheaves of legal documents and memoranda required to bring NASA to life, one memo quietly circulated at what was soon to be renamed the Langley Research Center, authored by Langley’s assistant director, Floyd Thompson, dated May 5, 1958, officially ending segregation at Langley. “Effective this date, the West Area Computers Unit is dissolved.”

Dorothy’s career as a manager came to an end on the last day of the West Area Computing office.

Langley’s fresh start was giving Dorothy Vaughan a fresh start as well. She would now begin life at the new agency as she had started her career at the NACA: as just one of the girls.

Chapter Seventeen

Outer Space

The only thing that rivaled Americans’ fear of the Soviet Union’s incipient prowess in the heavens was their wounded national pride.

When America should venture beyond the confines of Earth was just as obvious as why. But how? That was what Katherine Goble ached to know.

The only real reference that the Langley brain busters could lay their hands on was Introduction to Celestial Mechanics, a 1914 textbook by Forest Ray Moulton.

John Mayer tackled orbital mechanics, Al Hamer lectured on rocket propulsion, and Alton Mayo handled reentry, the problems faced by an object returning to Earth. Carl Huss taught the physics of the solar system. Ted Skopinski was the trajectories guy, elaborating on the math describing the path taken by a space vehicle as it left Earth’s surface and settled into orbit around it.

Massaging the Monroe calculator and filling out the data sheets, which grew longer and wider as the work became more intricate, would still be part of her daily duties. But the engineers in the group now assigned her the job of preparing the charts and equations for the well-received space technology lectures.

By the measure of the rest of the country, she was an insider’s insider. She enjoyed a front-row seat at a spectacle that the rest of the citizenry learned about in the daily newspaper and on the nightly news. But however close she sat to the room where the meetings took place, she was still an outsider if she couldn’t get in the door.

“Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it”—that was the Langley way.

“Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” she asked the engineers. A postgame recap of the analysis wasn’t nearly as thrilling as being there for the main event. How could she not want to be a part of the discussion? They were her numbers, after all. “Girls don’t go to the meetings,” Katherine’s male colleagues told her. “Is there a law against it?” Katherine retorted. There wasn’t, in fact. There were laws telling her where she might answer nature’s call—a law she ignored at Langley—and which fountain to drink from. There were laws restricting her ability to apply for a credit card in her own name, because she was a woman. But no law applied to the editorial meeting. It wasn’t personal: it was just the way things had always been done, they told her.

“Let her go,” they finally said, exasperated. The engineers just got tired of saying no. Who were they, they must have figured, to stand in the way of someone so committed to making a contribution, so convinced of the quality of her contribution that she was willing to stand up to the men whose success—or failure—might tip the balance in the outcome of the Cold War?

In 1958, Katherine Goble finally made it into the editorial meetings of the Guidance and Control Branch of Langley’s Flight Research Division, soon to be renamed the Aerospace Mechanics Division of the nearly-ready-for-prime-time National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Chapter Eighteen

With All Deliberate Speed

On the morning of October 1, the former NACAites walked into the Langley Research Center, epicenter of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a new American agency whose birth had been induced by a hurtling Soviet sphere.

In a less urgent scenario, NASA personnel might have taken a more NACA-like approach to the problem of space by conducting a careful, measured investigation of all possible options for space travel and recommending the ones with the greatest long-term potential. There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government’s decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species.

The spacecraft itself, the can that would take a man into space, was the brainchild of Dorothy Lee’s boss, Maxime Faget.

The rockets NASA needed to blast spacemen and spacecraft into space would come from the army’s existing inventory of Redstone and Atlas missiles, overseen by Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The propulsion experts at NASA’s laboratory in Cleveland took the lead on the craft’s electrical system and the retrofire rockets built into the craft itself.

Like Katherine and her colleagues at Langley, women at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland spent thousands upon thousands of woman-hours computing ballistics trajectory tables, which soldiers used to accurately calibrate and fire their weapons, as Jim Johnson had in Korea. The first attempt to put a man into space, NASA decided, should be a simple ballistic flight, with the capsule fired into space by a rocket like a bullet from a gun or a tennis ball from a tennis ball machine.

A well-executed suborbital flight would buy the United States a little breathing room; but orbital flight—the end game of Project Mercury—was infinitely more complex. Successful orbital flight required the engineers to adjust the tennis ball machine’s chute to the correct angle and arm its launcher with enough force to send the ball up through the atmosphere and into an orbit around Earth on a path so precisely specified, so true, that when it came back down through the atmosphere, it was still within spitting distance of the navy’s waiting racket.

Sitting in the emptier office, she plunged into the analysis, although the pesky laws of physics turned an afternoon of rote celestial tennis practice into a forces free-for-all. Earth’s gravity exerted its force on the satellite and had to be accounted for in the trajectory’s system of equations. Earth’s oblateness—the fact that it was not perfectly spherical but slightly squat, like a mandarin orange—needed to be specified, as did the speed of the planet’s rotation. Even if the capsule were to shoot off into the air directly overhead and come back down in the same straight line, it would land in a different spot, because Earth had moved.

Stepped on, turned out, pulled apart, and subjected to every stress test the editorial committees could throw at it, Katherine’s road map would help lead NASA to the day when the balance of the space race was tipped in favor of the United States.

Chapter Nineteen

Model Behavior

Emma Jean Landrum, another member of Langley’s tiny engineering sisterhood, sat a couple of desks away from Mary in the Four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel office. Emma Jean was valedictorian of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s class of 1946, working her way through school serving meals in the dining hall and grading papers for professors. Like so many of the women at Langley, Emma Jean had been recruited by Virginia Tucker, Langley’s erstwhile Head Computer. In the years since, Emma Jean had produced several research reports as a part of the Unitary Plan Tunnel team; she then transferred to the Four-Foot SPT office, where she became another of Kaz Czarnecki’s frequent collaborators. She, like Mary Jackson, had become an engineer in 1958.

With each passing year, it seemed that the work Mary loved and the community service that gave her life meaning were becoming one and the same. She earned her engineering title through hard work, talent, and drive, but the opportunity to fight for it was made possible by the work of the people who had come before her. Dorothy Vaughan had had a positive impact on her career and on the phenomenon-in-waiting that was Katherine Johnson. Dorothy Hoover had shown that a black woman was capable of the highest level of theoretical aeronautical research. Pearl Young, Virginia Tucker, Kitty Joyner—Mary stood on those white women’s shoulders too. Each one had cracked the hole in the wall a little wider, allowing the next talent to come through. And now that Mary had walked through, she was going to open the wall as wide as possible for the people coming behind her.

What do you want to be when you grow up? the Norfolk Journal and Guide reporter must have asked. “I want to be an engineer like my mother,” Levi said.

Levi Jackson was the “first colored boy in history” to win the peninsula’s soap box derby.

If a black kid could take home the soap box derby trophy, what else might be possible?

Achievement through hard work, social progress through science, possibility through belief …

Chapter Twenty

Degrees of Freedom

Commenting on the situation in 1963, United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy said, “The only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia.”

When Dorothy Vaughan turned off the lights in the West Area Computing office for the last time, she and the remaining women in the segregated pool were dispatched to the four corners of the laboratory, finally catching up to colleagues who had already found permanent positions in an engineering group. Marjorie Peddrew and Isabelle Mann went to Gas Dynamics, Lorraine Satchell and Arminta Cooke joined Mary Jackson in the Supersonic Tunnels Branch, Hester Lovely and Daisy Alston left for the Twenty-Inch Hypersonic Jets Branch, Eunice Smith went to Ground Loads, and Pearl Bassette was assigned to the Eleven-Inch Hypersonic Tunnel.

Dorothy Vaughan was keenly aware of that undulating invisible line that separated the past from the future. At fifty years old and many years into her second career, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer. Engineers still made the pilgrimage to her desk, asking for her help with their computing. Now, instead of assigning the task to one of her girls, Dorothy made a date with the IBM 704 computer that occupied the better part of an entire room in the basement of Building 1268, the room cooled to polar temperatures to keep the machine’s vacuum tubes from overheating.