NASA’s Hidden Figures: Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan

The Space Race was won with equations… equations calculated by three Black women in the segregated back wing of NASA.

For decades, the story of NASA’s achievements focused on white male engineers and astronauts.

But behind the headlines were the “hidden figures”, who solved the equations that sent John Glenn into orbit and helped Apollo 11 land on the Moon.

In 2016, Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures (and the film that followed) finally told the world about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.

All three started as a “human computer” at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Lab.

And all three joined during segregation.

Forced to eat, work, and pee separately from their white colleagues.

Katherine Johnson

Katherine started high school at 13.

In 1953, she took a job in the all-Black West Area Computing Section, led by Dorothy Vaughan.

She was pulled onto a crash analysis project and calculated launch trajectories and orbital reentry paths by hand.

In 1960, she coauthored “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position.”

It was the first time a woman in her division received authorship credit on a NASA report.

Then came 1962.

John Glenn was prepping for his Friendship 7 orbital mission... the first by an American.

He didn’t trust the IBM computers, so he said: “Get the girl to check the numbers. If she says they’re good, I’m ready to go.”

Katherine ran the equations.

Glenn flew.

America won a major battle in the Space Race.

Johnson also calculated the rendezvous path for the Apollo Lunar Module.

In 2015, at 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Dorothy Vaughan

She was hired by NACA (NASA’s precursor) in 1943 during WWII and assigned to the segregated West Area Computing unit, where she crunched aeronautics data around the clock.

In 1949, Vaughan was promoted to lead the West Area Computing Section, making her the first Black supervisor at NACA.

But Vaughan saw the next transition coming: from humans to IBM machines.

So she taught herself FORTRAN and trained her entire team.

Then she led NASA’s first integrated programming section in the Analysis and Computation Division.

She retired in 1971 after 28 years. She never got another management title.

But all the women she trained carried her legacy forward.

Mary Jackson

Mary started as a schoolteacher. Then a bookkeeper. Then a receptionist.

By 1951, she landed in West Computing at Langley, working under Dorothy Vaughan.

Two years later, engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki pulled her into the supersonic pressure tunnel, where they blasted models with wind at 2x the speed of sound.

He urged her to become an engineer.

But to qualify, she had to take night classes at a whites-only high school.

So she petitioned the city for permission.

She got in. She got the grades.

And in 1958, she became NASA’s first Black female engineer.

In 2021, NASA renamed its DC headquarters in her honor.