Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  If anyone could bear witness to the long-term impact of persistent action, and also to the strength of the forces opposing change, it was Dorothy Vaughan. Virginia’s governor, Lindsay Almond, capitulated, reopening Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Front Royal schools in 1959 and inching toward integration: eighty-six black students in those districts now attended school with whites. In Prince Edward County, however, segregationists would not be moved: they defunded the entire county school system, including R. R. Moton in Farmville, rather than integrate. No municipality in all of America had ever taken such draconian action. As white parents herded their students into the new segregation academies, the most resourceful black families scrambled to salvage their children’s educations by sending them to live with relatives around the state, some as far afield as North Carolina. Prince Edward’s schools would remain closed from 1959 through 1964, five long and bitter years. Many of the affected children, known as the “Lost Generation,” never made up the missing grades of education. Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth. Dorothy’s friends and former Moton colleagues watched helplessly as their children’s futures were sacrificed in the battle over the future of Virginia’s public schools. 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.”

  Meanwhile, Langley moved in the opposite direction. 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.

  As for the West Computers’ erstwhile leader, Dorothy Vaughan found herself in a new seat in another brand-new building. In 1960, Langley had only just completed Building 1268, a West Side facility housing one of the most advanced computer complexes on the East Coast. Electronic computing had moved from the wings of aeronautical research to the main stage. Accordingly, Langley centralized its computing operations into a group named the Analysis and Computation Division, created to service all the center’s research operations, as well as to provide computing to outside contractors. The ACD organization chart was a snapshot of two decades of change at Langley. Dorothy was reunited with many of her West Computers, but they now worked side by side with East Computing alumni like Sara Bullock and Barbara Weigel.

  Perhaps more striking than the racial integration of the female mathematicians, which had been spreading organically throughout Langley for years, was the fact that a group focused on computing now employed increasing numbers of men. The function of computing had been promoted from an all-female service organization with minimal hardware requirements to a top-level division with an eight-figure operating budget; it was starting to look a lot more like a launchpad and a career path to ambitious young men. The room-sized machines were remaking the old models of aeronautical research; their ascendance marked the beginning of an era that promised to be even more momentous than the one ushered in by the flying machine. For better or worse, it also signaled the beginning of the end of computing as women’s work.

  Some of the older women at the center, the ones who still relied upon the mechanical calculators, were starting to look as if they were stranded on an island, separated from the mainland by a gulf that grew wider each year. The early 1960s were an inflection point in the history of computing, a dividing line between the time when computers were human and when they were inanimate, when a computing job was handed off to a room full of women sitting at desks topped with $500 mechanical calculating machines and when a computing job was processed by a room-sized computer that cost in excess of $1 million.

  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.

  In the past, Dorothy would have set up the equations in a data sheet and walked one of her girls through the process of filling it out. At ACD, it was her job to convert the engineers’ equations into the computer’s formula translation language—FORTRAN—by using a special machine to punch holes in 7⅜"×3¼" cards printed with an array of eighty columns, each column displaying the numbers 0 through 9, each space assigned a number, letter, or character. Once punched, each cream-colored card represented one set of FORTRAN instructions.

  The longer or more complex the program, the more cards the programmer fed the computer. The machines tapped out at two thousand cards—two thousand lines of instructions. Even modest programs could require a tray of hundreds of the cards, which needed to be fed into the computer in the correct order. Woe to the klutz who dropped a box of cards on the floor. Some programmers tried to forestall disaster by taking a Magic Marker and painting a big diagonal swath on the top surface of a vertical stack of cards, a continuous line from the front corner on the first card to the opposite back corner of the final card, hoping that the tiny dot of color on each would provide the key to reassembling the fumbled cards into the correct order.

  As powerful as ACD’s computer was, however, the maestros of Project Mercury would require even more electronic horsepower for what was to come next. 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 planned suborbital flights presented a controlled set of challenges. Taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and landing in the Atlantic at a spot approximately fifty miles from Turks and Caicos, the hurtling capsule would remain within communications range of Mission Control in Florida and the data centers in DC and Bermuda. Orbital flights—which sent the astronaut on one or more ninety-minute circuits around the globe, passing out of visual and radio contact with Mission Control, flying over unfriendly territory—upped the ante by a factor. Constant contact with the astronaut during every minute of every orbit was a prerequisite for the flight.

  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 Mercury tracking network in and of itself was a project whose scale and boldness rivaled that of the space missions it supported. The eighteen communications stations set up at measured intervals around the globe, including two set up on navy ships (one in the Atlantic Ocean, another in the Indian Ocean), used powerful satellite receivers to acquire the radio signal of the Mercury capsule as it passed overhead. Each station transmitted data on the craft’s position and speed back to Mercury control, which bounced the data to the Goddard computers. The “CO3E” software program, developed by the Mission Analysis br
anch 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.

  The launch date for Project Mercury’s first manned mission slipped into 1961, a year that announced itself as unpredictable from the start: on January 3, the United States cut diplomatic relations with Cuba, another step down the road in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, railed against the United States’ growing military-industrial complex. On March 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, newly inaugurated, announced Executive Order 10925, ordering the federal government and its contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity for all of their employees and applicants, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. Through it all, the Space Task Group, the Langley Research Group, the other NASA centers, and thousands of NASA contractors pressed forward on their aerodynamic, structural, materials, and component tests, closing in on a target launch date in May.

  “We could have beaten them, we should have beaten them,” Project Mercury flight director Chris Kraft recalled decades later. In the midst of America’s high hopes for redemption in the heavens, the Soviets struck again. On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became in one fell swoop the first human in space and the first human to orbit Earth. Unlike the disorientation, anxiety, and fear that Sputnik provoked, the agency absorbed the blow. It was painful, certainly, and embarrassing as well, but they turned the welter of emotion into renewed intensity for the mission, employing all of their talents and the principles of math, physics, and engineering to create a precise and thorough plan. Now they executed it with the knowledge that there was only one direction to move: forward.

  It would take a total of 1.2 million tests, simulations, investigations, inspections, verifications, corroborations, experiments, checkouts, and dry runs just to send the first American into space, a precursor to achieving Project Mercury’s goal of placing a man into orbit. Every mission involved the Mercury capsule, though the rockets—Scout, Redstone, and Atlas—varied. 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. Forty-five million Americans would tune in to witness the ultimate success or failure of MR-3. When Shepard finally strapped into the disarmingly small capsule—just six feet in diameter and six feet, ten inches high—and rode the Redstone candle into space, reaching an altitude of 116.5 miles above Earth, it was a resurrection for the United States and a much-needed dose of adrenaline for NASA.

  The suborbital flight in the capsule Shepard christened Freedom 7 lasted only fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds and covered 303 miles, just about the distance between Hampton, Virginia, and Charleston, West Virginia. Freedom 7 was a pale technical achievement compared to Yuri Gagarin’s flight the month before, but its success emboldened President Kennedy to pledge the country to a goal significantly more ambitious: a manned mission to the Moon.

  “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. Every NASA employee involved with the space program, still burning the midnight oil working on Project Mercury, broke out in a cold sweat. The agency hadn’t yet achieved its mandate to place a human into orbit, and Kennedy already had them kicking up Moon dust?

  It was a terrifying prospect—and the most exhilarating thing they had ever heard. Unspoken publicly until that moment, getting to the Moon, one of mankind’s deepest and most enduring dreams, had long been the private dream of many at Langley as well. But with only one operational success under its belt and with six Mercury missions to go—with the orbital flight still on the drawing board—NASA’s road to the Moon seemed unimaginably complex. 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.

  The whispered rumors now gained currency: the Space Task Group’s time in Hampton was coming to an end. The Langley employees, and the locals, campaigned with all their might to keep their brainchild from leaving home. Geography and politics had smiled on Virginia in 1915, when the NACA first went searching for its proving ground and aeronautical laboratory. As it had in the period leading up to World War I, the federal government made a list of possible sites for the headquarters for its space effort, looking for the right combination of climate, available land, and friendly politicians. In 1960, nine locations made the short list, but Virginia was not one of them. 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.

  Over in Building 60 on Langley’s East Side, Katherine’s former colleagues Ted Skopinski, John Mayer, Carl Huss, and Harold Beck, who led the Mission Analysis branch within the rapidly growing Space Task Group, prepared for the move to Houston. Mary Shep Burton, Catherine T. Osgood, and Shirley Hunt Hinson, the math aides who ran the trajectory analysis software on the group’s IBM 704, also decided to go. Unless more Langley women volunteered to make the move, the members of the branch worried that their new office “was going to be badly understaffed” just as the workload skyrocketed.

  Katherine Johnson had been asked to transfer to Houston with the group, but her husband, Jim, wanted them to stay close to their families. Resisting Houston’s call, not following the nerve center of the space program across the country, was difficult for Katherine and many of her Langley colleagues. It was “impractical” to recruit the mathematicians they needed in Virginia, so Mary Shep Burton and John Mayer went to Houston to recruit “five qualified young women” to come to Langley for training before setting up a permanent new computing pool in the under-construction “Manned Spacecraft Center.” The move echoed the establishment of the first computing pool at Langley twenty-five years before.

  The residents of Building 1244 might have been staying put in Hampton, but despite their concerns, much work remained for them on Project Mercury. Alan Shepard’s flight was a triumph. MR-4, Virgil Grissom’s July 1961 suborbital flight, came and went in a flash.

  NASA’s first orbital mission, and the debut of the all-important tracking and communications network, shimmered in the near distance like a heat mirage. Katherine and Ted Skopinski had laid out the fundamentals of the orbital trajectory nearly two years earlier, in their important Azimuth Angle report, then handed off the responsibility for the calculation of the flight launch conditions to the IBM computers. Like Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johns
on knew that the rest of her career would be defined by her ability to use the electronic computers to transcend human limits. But before she crossed completely to the world of electronic computing, Katherine Johnson would tackle one last, very important assignment, using the techniques and the tools that belonged to the human era of computing. 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

  Sending a man into space was a damn tall order, but it was the part about returning him safely to Earth that kept Katherine Johnson and the rest of the space pilgrims awake at night. Each mission presented myriad pathways to disaster, starting with the notoriously temperamental Atlas rocket, a ninety-five-foot-high, 3.5-million-horsepower intercontinental ballistic missile that had been modified to propel the Mercury capsule into orbit. Two of the Atlas’s last five sallies had ended in failure. One of them had surged into the sky before erupting into spectacular fireballs with the capsule still attached. That wasn’t exactly a confidence builder for the man preparing to ride it into orbit, but it was the more powerful Atlas that would be required to accelerate the Mercury capsule to orbital velocity. The capsule itself was the most sophisticated tin can on the planet. The vehicle’s oxygen and pressurization systems stood between the astronaut and the life-crushing vacuum of space. Those functions and more—every switch, every indicator, every gauge—had to be tested and retested for any whiff of possible failure. As the rocket blasted from the launchpad and accelerated into the sky toward maximum velocity, the aerodynamic pressure on the capsule also increased to a point known as “max Q.” If the capsule wasn’t strong enough to withstand the forces acting on it at max Q, it could simply explode. A Republican senator from Pennsylvania called the Mercury capsule-Atlas rocket pairing “a Rube Goldberg device on top of a plumber’s nightmare.”