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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

At the end of 1960, NASA purchased two IBM 7090s and installed them in a state-of-the-art facility in downtown Washington, DC, managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, a Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA field center opened in 1959 to focus exclusively on space science. The agency set up a third computer, a slightly smaller IBM 709, in a data center in Bermuda. Together the three computers would monitor and analyze all aspects of the spaceflights, from launch to splashdown.

The task of building a worldwide network of tracking stations that would maintain two-way communication between the orbiting spacecraft and Mission Control fell to Langley. Langley put all available resources behind the $80 million project in 1960, putting the final pieces in place just before December 1960, the originally scheduled date for the first suborbital mission.

The “CO3E” software program, developed by the Mission Analysis branch and programmed into the IBM computers, integrated all the equations of motion that described the spacecraft’s trajectory, ingested the real-time data from the remote stations, and then projected the remaining path of the flight, including its final splashdown spot. The computers also sounded the alarm at the first sign of trouble; any deviation from the projected flight path, evidence of malfunction on board the capsule, or abnormal vital signs from the astronaut, which were also being monitored and transmitted to doctors on the ground, would send Mission Control into troubleshooting mode.

Mercury-Redstone 1, or “MR-1,” the first mission to mate the Mercury capsule to the Redstone rocket, failed on the launchpad. MR-2, with Ham the chimpanzee as its passenger, overshot the landing spot by sixty miles and was nearly underwater when it was finally plucked from the ocean. Pulling back the curtain on three and a half years of work, NASA took the audacious step of deciding to broadcast the launch of Project Mercury’s first manned mission—“Mercury-Redstone 3,” carrying astronaut Alan Shepard—live.

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” President Kennedy said before a session of Congress, not three weeks after Shepard splashed down.

The engineers estimated that the upcoming orbital flight, including the fully manned global tracking network, required a team of eighteen thousand people. The buildup to a lunar landing would demand many times more people than could be reasonably supported by Mother Langley.

Due in no small part to the influence of powerful Texans, including now Vice President Lyndon Johnson, NASA decided to move the heart of its space program to Houston. Many of the Langley employees—the former NACA nuts, including Katherine Johnson—were going to have to make hard choices. They had come to love their home by the sea, from the abundant fresh seafood to the mild winters to the water that surrounded the lonely finger of land that had become such a part of them. Soon, they knew, following the president’s lead into space might mean choosing between the place that had given them a community and the passion for the work that gave their life meaning.

Like her fellow West Virginian John Henry, the steel-driving man who faced off against the steam hammer, Katherine Johnson would soon be asked to match her wits against the prowess of the electronic computer.

Chapter Twenty-One

Out of the Past, the Future

While NASA appeared to be dithering on the ground, Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov followed Yuri Gagarin’s April 1961 triumph with a successful seventeen-orbit flight, nearly a full day in space, on October 6, 1961.

Finally, the Space Task Group affixed February 20, 1962, as John Glenn’s debut.

The astronauts, by background and by nature, resisted the computers and their ghostly intellects. In a test flight, a pilot staked his reputation and his life on his ability to exercise total, direct, and constant control over the plane. A tiny error in judgment or a speck of delay in deciding on a course of action might mean the difference between safety and calamity. In a plane, at least, it was the pilot’s call; the “fly-by-wire” setup of the Mercury missions, where the craft and its controls were tethered via radio communication to the whirring electronic computers on the ground, pushed the hands-on astronauts out of their comfort zone. Every engineer and mathematician had a story of double-checking the machines’ data only to find errors. What if the computer lost power or seized up and stopped working during the flight? That too was something that happened often enough to give the entire team pause. The human computers crunching all of those numbers—now that the astronauts understood. The women mathematicians dominated their mechanical calculators the same way the test pilots dominated their mechanical planes. The numbers went into the machines one at a time, came out one at a time, and were stored on a piece of paper for anyone to see. Most importantly, the figures flowed in and out of the mind of a real person, someone who could be reasoned with, questioned, challenged, looked in the eye if necessary. The process of arriving at a final result was tried and true, and...

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” said the astronaut. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I’m ready to go.

Also at Goddard was Dorothy Hoover, embarking on the third (or fourth, or maybe fifth) act of her career. Following her graduate work at the University of Michigan, Hoover had worked at the Weather Bureau for three years. Perhaps nostalgic for the agency that had boosted her mathematical career, she transferred to Goddard in 1959, the only one of the centers that had been created organically out of NASA. Her career advance had continued; she now held a senior ranking of GS-13. While her colleagues at Langley put their minds to work on the engineering project of the century, Dorothy Hoover folded herself back into the theoretical work she loved, continuing her publication record with a coauthored book on computational physics.

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.

At the Four-foot SPT, Mary Jackson conducted tests of the Apollo capsule and other components, honing their fitness for the portion of the journey that would take place in the supersonic speed regime. That work would earn her an Apollo Team Achievement Award. Sue Wilder was rolling up her sleeves among the “mad scientists” of Langley’s Magnetoplasmadynamics (MPD) Branch, her work also concerned with the physics of a vehicle reentering the atmosphere.

But because of her close working relationship with the pioneers of the Space Task Group, it was Katherine Johnson who found herself in a position to make the most immediate contribution to the pageant that was about to begin in Florida.

To mention that the stakes increased dramatically with a person on board was an understatement (if disaster did befall John Glenn, one secret military document proposed blaming it on the Cubans, using it as an excuse to overthrow Fidel Castro).

At 9:47 a.m. EST, the Atlas rocket boosted Friendship 7 into orbit like a champion archer hitting a bull’s-eye. The insertion was so good that the ground controllers cleared Glenn for seven orbits. But then, during the first orbit, the capsule’s automatic control system began to act up, causing the capsule to pull back and forth like a badly aligned car. The problem was relatively minor; Glenn smoothed it out by switching the system to manual, keeping the capsule in its correct position the same way he would have flown a plane. At the end of the second orbit, an indicator in the capsule suggested that the all-important heat shield was loose. Without that firewall, there was nothing standing between the astronaut and the 3,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures—almost as hot as the surface of the Sun—that would build up around the capsule as it passed back through the atmosphere. From Mission Control came an executive decision: at the end of the third orbit, after the retrorockets were to be fired, Glenn was to keep the rocket pack attached to the craft rather than jettisoning it as was standard procedure. The retropack, it was hoped, would keep the potentially loose heat shield in place.

When he finally splashed down, he was off by forty miles, only because of an incorrect estimate in the capsule’s reentry weight. Otherwise, both computers, electronic and human, had performed like a dream. Twenty-one minutes after landing, the USS Noa scooped the astronaut out of the water.

John Glenn was a bona fide hero, but he wasn’t the only one being cheered. Word of Katherine Johnson’s role in Glenn’s successful mission began making the rounds in the black community, first locally, then farther afield. On March 10, 1962, a glamorous Katherine Johnson, bedecked in pearls and an elegant suit that would have made Jackie Kennedy proud, smiled from the front page of the Pittsburgh Courier. “Her name … in case you haven’t already guessed it … is Katherine Johnson: mother, wife, career woman”! (Below the feature on Katherine Johnson, another headline inquired: “Why No Negro Astronauts?”)

Chapter Twenty-Two

America Is for Everybody

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held August 28, 1963, attracting as many as three hundred thousand people to the nation’s capital. Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez all took to the stage, musical witnesses to the idealism, hope, and persistence of a movement that drew its strength from its desire to force America to live up to its founding principles.

“Dear Mrs. Vaughan: Our records indicate that you recently completed 20 years of Federal Government service,” wrote Langley’s director, Floyd Thompson, in the summer of 1963. A gold-and-enamel lapel pin adorned with a ruby was to be bestowed upon her at the center’s annual awards ceremony, which recognized employees hitting milestones of service with the center.

Many in the generation of Negro students who came of age in a decade defined by Brown v. Board of Education and Sputnik—the ones who in the future would be known as the civil rights generation—were drawn into the engineering profession for the “economic and social mobility” that was the result of the national demand for technical skills. Most of them were southerners; for them, there was no need to adjust to living conditions that they had known all their lives. In the mid-1960s, with “dreams of working at NASA,” greater numbers of black college students found their way to Langley. Many of them were taken under the protective wing of Mary Jackson, who, like an ambassador, helped the recruits find places to live and settle into their jobs. She and Levi opened their house to them if they needed a home-cooked meal, or simply a place to go when they felt homesick. Mary and the other black employees at Langley tended the new recruits as carefully and lovingly as if they were a garden.

The tragic end of Apollo 1 shook NASA to its core. The astronauts weren’t hundreds of thousands of miles away when the accident happened; they were on the ground, within feet of the ground crew and the engineers, and yet they still died. The road to the stars was a rough one, and the Apollo team needed no reminder of the risk. They redesigned the spacecraft, fixing flaws that had been exposed by the disaster and redoubling their focus on every possible detail of the next nine missions, each a step in the stairway to the Moon. The ascent to the Moon landing was predicated on the belief that each cell in the body of the space program was both individually superb and seamlessly connected to the cells around it.

Two vehicles and 238,900 miles: three days there and three days back. Twenty-one hours on the surface of the Moon for two astronauts in the lunar lander, while the service module circled the heavenly body in a parking orbit. Katherine knew better than anyone that if the trajectory of the parked service module was even slightly off, when the astronauts ended their lunar exploration and piloted their space buggy back up from the Moon’s surface, the two vehicles might not meet up. The command service module was the astronauts’ bus—their only bus—back to Earth: the lander would ferry the astronauts to the waiting service module and then be discarded. If the two vehicles’ orbits didn’t coincide, the two in the lander would be stranded forever in the vacuum of space.

Katherine Johnson, for her part, was determined to make this happen. She arrived at the office early, went home in the late afternoon to check on her daughters, and then came back in the evening, maintaining a schedule of fourteen- or sixteen-hour days. She and engineer Al Hamer collaborated on four reports between 1963 and 1969, some of them written to work out the all-important lunar orbits, others asking the question, What if? What if the computers went out? What if there was an electrical failure on board the spacecraft and the astronauts needed to navigate back home by the stars, like the mariners of a simpler age? As the years of the 1960s slipped by, it seemed that Katherine was increasingly at the office late at night, the hours passing like minutes as she and Hamer refined calculations and made rough drafts of diagrams for their reports.

Chapter Twenty-Three

To Boldly Go

They dotted the globe, those who had worked on Project Apollo, those who had made possible the day that had come. They clustered around displays and switchboards and dials and computers, monitoring every heartbeat of the spacecraft that had slipped out of the influence of its home planet and was now being enticed by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Most of them joined their friends and families in gathering around the televisions as well.

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 to history.

Cronkite gushed unabashedly, putting the magnitude into the context of the great machines of war and transportation that had transformed the American century: the mighty Saturn V rocket consumed the equivalent of ninety-eight railroad cars’ worth of fuel; it propelled a craft that weighed as much as a nuclear submarine with the equivalent thrust of 543 fighter jets. The United States would spend $24 billion on Apollo, in order to plunge the sword into the heart of the Soviet Union’s ambitions in space.

Not everyone shared Cronkite’s exuberance. All that money—and for what? many wondered. So much money spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.

There were real and shining triumphs, certainly: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pried Jim Crow’s legal grip off the country’s workplaces, modes of transportation, public spaces, and voting box. But the economic and social mobility that had been held hostage by that legal discrimination remained stuck.

The decision to prioritize a victory in space over problems on Earth was the most widespread criticism against the space program. But even those voices in the black community who expressed admiration for the astronauts, who supported the program and its mission, took NASA to the woodshed for its lack of black faces. No black television commentators, no black administrators, no black faces in Mission Control, and most of all, no black astronauts. Blacks were still smarting over the perceived mistreatment of Ed Dwight, an astronaut trainee who was given his walking papers before he could even report for duty.

Star Trek landed in American homes on September 8, 1966, an NBC network prime-time program. While NASA and the Project Gemini astronauts worked their way through twelve missions in the 1960s, in the fictional 2260s, the starship Enterprise set off from Earth on a peacekeeping and deep-space exploration mission, manned by a multinational, multiracial, mixed-gender crew.

Lieutenant Uhura, a black woman and proud citizen of the United States of Africa, served as the Enterprise’s communications officer.

“This is not a black role, this is not a female role,” he said to her. “This is a unique role that brings to life what we are marching for: equality.” The rest of Nichols’ weekend was a fog of anger and sadness: what right did Dr. King have to upend her career plans? Eventually, she moved from resignation to conviction. Nichols returned to Gene Roddenberry’s office on Monday morning and asked him to tear up the resignation letter.

Star Trek was set in 2266, but it wasn’t necessary to wait three centuries to see what America’s finest minds could do, given free rein. The Apollo mission was happening now. In the Hillside Inn, among the group of her sorority sisters. Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts’ place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft?

Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.

The Apollo 11 astronauts had given the mission only a middling chance of success: though Neil Armstrong handicapped the odds of returning to Earth safely at 90 percent, he thought they had only a 50-50 chance of landing on the Moon on the first go. Katherine Johnson had confidence: she knew her numbers were right, and she assumed that everyone else—Marge Hannah and the fellas there in her office, Mary Jackson and Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams, everyone from the top of NASA to the bottom—had given their all to the mission.

Katherine allowed the moment, with all its implications, to sink in. There were still challenges ahead. She watched the men in the dust of the Moon and thought of the orbiting command service module, out of view of the camera, circling the Moon every ninety minutes. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon would have a brief window to get back into the lunar lander and reconnect their dinghy with the mother ship above. After that, it would be three long days on the highway back to Earth, then through the fire of the atmosphere and into the terrestrial ocean below.

Katherine and Al Hamer had already started thinking about what it would take to plot a course to Mars; their colleagues Marge Hannah and John Young would look even farther into the cosmos, dreaming up a “grand tour” of the outer planets.

The nimble minds in 1244 were already hopping from Mars to Jupiter and on to Saturn, like stones skipped in a glassy lake.

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.

Epilogue

Why haven’t I heard this story before?