At the bottom, watch the trailer for Hidden Figures, which goes into limited release on Christmas before opening wide in January. Spend some time with Johnson in the video below (she’s still alive at 98). Without their brains, without their hard work and dedication to NASA and the long hours that they worked together, we would have not made it into space. She sums up the importance of their contribution: The mission is primarily designed to look at black holes. There’s also Dorothy Vaughan, played by Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer, who was NASA’s first African-American supervisor.Īctress Janelle Monáe, who plays Mary Jackson, admits that she had “no idea” of their story before reading the script. Nasas Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has produced the most sensitive solar portrait ever taken in high-energy X-rays. Henson in the film, who “calculated the trajectories for Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission” in 1962. Then there is mathematician Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. They include Mary Jackson (pictured above), who may have been the only black female aeronautical engineer in the 1950s. Quite simply, these women were essential to the math that made space travel possible. She says she knew women, including black women, were at NASA, but “didn’t know exactly what they did.” This is despite growing up near NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia and having a mix of neighbors and relatives work at NASA, including her own father. Indeed, Shetterly herself only began to appreciate the story around 2010. Quite simply, space exploration wouldn’t have been possible without remarkable black women who served as human “computers.” Now their story is at last being told, thanks to the motion picture Hidden Figures and the book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly. It’s also a superb time to learn about a chapter of this tale that has been surprisingly unknown. The recent passing of astronaut John Glenn has inspired much reminiscing about the remarkable days when NASA proved man could break free of the Earth’s bonds.
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