Hidden Figures: Chapter 21–Epilogue

He pushed himself to his physical limit, running miles each day to stay fit, tag-teaming with fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter to practice water egress from the capsule in the Back River on Langley’s East Side.

American government officials, the press, and the public expressed their disappointment with the delays, many impugning the agency’s judgment and competence.

Three days prior to the most significant date of his life, Glenn went through a final simulation, carrying out a full checkout of his flight plan.

The parade ended at Darling Stadium, the namesake of the oyster magnate whose creative entrepreneurship had brokered the land deal with the federal government for the Langley laboratory a half century before.

Unlike 1941’s ghost rally — the march that never happened, the impetus for Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 opening federal jobs to Negro employees — Randolph was going to see this one through.

Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted.

They experienced the indescribable joy of seeing their endeavors coalesce with those of the hundreds of thousands of other people now involved in the space program, the collective effort so much greater than the sum of the individual parts that it began to feel like a separate being.

The women who watched joined with their fellow Americans in a moment of consonance, the roulette of emotions in the room — pride, elation, impatience, awe, resentment, patriotism, suspense, fear — replayed in differing mixtures in living rooms and meeting places around the United States.

Newsome Park and the hundreds of neighborhoods like it around the country became increasingly volatile, desperate islands where housing, schooling, and every other state-supplied service were left to deteriorate.

Lieutenant Uhura, portrayed by the actress Nichelle Nichols, executed her duties with aplomb, managing the ship’s communications with other ships and planets.

The men existed all alone out there in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong.

It was serendipitous that Lovell had taken the technique for a test run on Apollo 8 and knew how to make the calculations.

That along the way she equaled the prowess of an electronic computer, becoming a brainy, female John Henry, only served to burnish her myth.

One of those whose careers she tracked was Christine Darden, the young mathematician who had been galvanized by Sputnik back in 1957.

It was work at aeronautics’ leading edge, a computational fluid dynamics project that might help to mitigate the sonic boom that had made commercial supersonic flight so unpalatable.