Hidden Figures: Chapters 16–20

The US Army’s Jupiter-C missile had been tested successfully on several occasions, and the Americans were ahead of the Russians in terms of the systems that guided missiles on their trajectories into space.

But President Eisenhower had insisted that the nation’s first foray into space be presented as a peaceful effort, rather than an explicitly military operation that risked triggering a dangerous retaliation by the Soviet Union.

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 no-go situation in the Virginia schools was evidence of just how difficult it was going to be to pull out the roots of the caste system that had defined and circumscribed virtually every interaction between whites and those considered nonwhite since the English first set foot on the Virginia coast.

Driven by the pragmatic sensibility of the engineers, management had naturally tacked toward a policy of benign neglect with respect to the bathroom signs and lunchrooms, neither enforcing compliance with the rules nor eliminating them altogether.

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.

Katherine Johnson's deskmates — John Mayer, Ted Skopinski, Alton Mayo, Harold “Al” Hamer, Carl Huss — moved from one meeting to another, conferring with each other, with their bosses, with representatives of aircraft manufacturers and military services, turning to every possible source in order to aggregate intelligence for the still inchoate endeavor.

Whether or not a woman was promoted, if she was given a raise, if she had access to the smoky sessions where the future was being conceived and built, had much to do with the prejudices and predilections of the men she worked for.

But from sundown one day to sunup the next, they had gone, if only in the public imagination, from erudite and obscure to obvious and spectacular, from the crackpots of the airplane epoch of the 1940s to the guardians of the space-age 1960s.

Rather than trying to make plans based on machinations beyond their reach, parents like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Goble worked hard to influence what they did control: pushing their children to excel in their segregated schools and getting them into college.

The workload generated by Project Mercury was so onerous that even after Mayer transferred from 1244 to the offices on the East Side, he “bootlegged” the overflow work to his old buddies Carl Huss and Ted Skopinski, getting them to help out with whatever time they could squeeze in around what they owed to Henry Pearson.

Mary also knew that a native of a place so flat it was practically underwater would need a leg up before hiking for days in the rarefied altitude of the Wyoming mountains.

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.

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.