Friday Musings: Hidden Figures

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn was strapped into the spacecraft he’d named Friendship 7 and launched into space where he went on to orbit the earth three times as part of the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission. It was a triumphant day for the United States, and the nation swelled with pride. The goal of the space program, both literally and figuratively, was to push against the unseen boundaries of the earth’s atmosphere and find opportunity and recognition in what lay beyond. The irony was, of course, that the greatest limitation that existed in America in 1962 was not located at the edge of the atmosphere, but could be found 50 miles beneath it where both blacks and women struggled every single day in their own search for opportunity and recognition. In the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, we learn the stories of three black women who made phenomenal contributions to the space program during this time period. Mary Jackson was NASA’s first female engineer of any background, Dorothy Vaughn was the first black supervisor, and Katherine Johnson’s trajectory computations for the Mercury mission were so precise and significant that John Glenn would not launch that February day without her reviewing what the new IBM computer had generated. All three women went on to have long careers at Langley where the success of their work helped to dismantle both racial and social boundaries. Johnson lived to be 101, dying just two years ago after she’d received the Presidential Medal of Freedom back in 2018.
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