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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

There’s something about this story that seems to resonate with people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and backgrounds. It’s a story of hope, that even among some of our country’s harshest realities—legalized segregation, racial discrimination—there is evidence of the triumph of meritocracy, that each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.

In 2015, President Obama awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor that astronaut John Glenn received in 2012.

Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs. I think Katherine would appreciate that.

With the Moon landing achieved, the victory over the Soviet Union in hand, there was no urgency to push beyond Project Apollo, whose last two missions narrowly escaped cancellation.

In 1972, the United States decided to cancel its supersonic transport program, the SST, which many aerodynamicists had hoped would give them an “Apollo moment,” a glorious, high-profile display of their technology.

The supersonic and hypersonic transport machines dreamed up in the 1950s and 1960s would have to wait, although in the 1970s Langley did turn much of its focus back to NASA’s first A: aeronautics.

One of the problems that the center focused on was noise abatement: busy skies were often noisy skies, even without sonic booms. Another issue was efficiency. With increasing fuel prices, the aircraft industry shifted its priority from increasing speed and power to boosting efficiency in subsonic or low supersonic flight.

Waves of RIFs and RIGs—Reductions in Force and Reductions in Grade—happened so frequently at Langley in the 1970s that they spawned a new verb, as in “John got riffed last week.” Those who did survive the RIFs felt a sense of betrayal at NASA’s significantly reduced ambitions.

Not only were the brain busters not heading to Mars and the outer planets, but by December 1972, they had left their final footprints on the Moon.

The NASA of the 1970s was interested in “routine, quick-reaction and economical access to space.” The agency would never return to the glory of the Apollo years. But despite the downsizing of everything—budgets, workforce, expectations—the will to explore the w...

Never one to miss an opportunity to continue her education, Mary took FORTRAN classes, teaching herself to program. The computers that had made long-distance spaceflight possible were also revolutionizing aeronautical research, a specialty known as computational fluid dynamics. The engineers now conducted experiments in their beloved wind tunnels and then compared the results with simulations on their computers. Just as the electronic machines had taken the place of human computers in aeronautical research, the day would eventually come when the computer would displace the wind tunnel itself.

Mary Jackson was a tireless promoter of science and engineering as a meaningful and stable career choice. She made so many speeches at local schools that one might have thought she was running for office: Thorpe and Sprately Junior High Schools, Carver and Huntington High Schools, Hampton Institute, Virginia Wesleyan, a small college in Norfolk.

In 1979, Mary Jackson organized the retirement party for Kazimierz Czarnecki, who was leaving government service after forty years. Two years prior, the facility that had been the bedrock of most of their work—the Four-by-Four-Foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, the third member of Mary and Kaz’s partnership—had come to the end of its service at Langley as well. In 1977, the tunnel that had been state-of-the-art technology when it began operations in 1947 was razed to make way for the National Transonic Facility, a 1.2 Mach, $85 million tunnel that was powered by cryogenic nitrogen.

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