Hidden Figures:The story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race Race

Hidden Figures: The story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race is the true story of how 3 black African-American (A-A) women helped NASA win the Space Race to the Moon. It was adapted as a biographical film of the same name and released in 2016 .

It is a film and not a documentary. It looked at the lives of three black (A-A) women who made major contributions to the orbital mission of the moon by John Glenn during the space race.

Wonderful, feel-good drama about the black female engineers and mathematicians who worked behind the scenes at a segregated NASA during the tense and ground breaking 1960s space race. Daily Mail- weekend

Segregation was made obvious. Jim Crow laws meant A-A women had to have separate dining room and bathroom facilities Katherine’s boss eventually became curious about her ‘absences’ - eventually he ’ ceremonially’ pulled down the ‘Whites only’ sign.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1958 became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

All three ladies started work at NACA, Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020), A-A, started to work for NACA in 1953. She was a human calculator - she was simply brilliant at mathematics. Her mental maths calculations were phenomenal. The new IBM computers had been programed with the orbital equations to control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, but were prone to errors!

Before his flight, as part of the preflight checklist,Glenn said 'Get that girl (Katherine 0 If she says they’re good then I’m ready to go. He wanted human confirmation that the figures were correct. Katherine was handed the data. She confirmed the calculations by running the numbers through by hand on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. Numbers confirmed Glenn had a successful mission,

Dorothy Vaughan (1910-2008), A-A ,started work at NACA in 1943. She was a mathematician and human calculator. She eventually became the first African=American to supervise a group of A-A staff at NASA’s Research Center in Hampton. She was in charge of the West Area Computers. She prepared for the the introduction of the IBM machine computers by teaching first herself and then her staff the programming language of Fortran.

Mary Jackson (nee Winston)(1921-2005), A-A, was a mathematician and aerospace engineer.
She started as a human computer at N A C A in 1951. Kazimierz Czarnecki, her boss, encouraged her to qualify as an engineer but she needed a degree. To do this she had to attend a night program at an all white school- Hampton High. After completing the course in 1958 she was promoted to aerospace engineer - the first black female NASA engineer. By 1979 she was the senior engineer.
She retrained for Equal Opportunities . Retired from NASA 1985.

All 3 of them were reward numerous awards and honors.
In 2020 two had a satellite named after them.