Younger than her closest sibling by eight years, and nearly thirteen years younger than her oldest brother, Christine’s early life revolved around the routines of the grown-up world. Shortly after Christine’s birth, Desma Mann returned to teaching. Christine stayed home with a babysitter until she was old enough to accompany her mother each day to her job in a two-room elementary school out in surrounding Union County. Across the street from the school stretched acres of cotton fields, the raw material for Monroe’s mill and the source of income for many county residents. The school year followed the picking season. Students sweltered in the desks throughout the North Carolina summer before being released in time for the harvest in September and October. With all potential playmates either in school or working in the fields, Christine entertained herself by joining in the lessons in her mother’s classroom. By the time she turned five, Desma Mann’s youngest daughter was a second-grade student, ready to attend the consolidated Winchester Avenue School in Monroe.
Christine became best friends with the principal’s daughter, Julia. The two were inseparable and went everywhere together. “Julia’s parents said she could go. Can I go too?” was Christine’s constant query to her parents. But with the onset of adolescence, as requests turned from afternoons riding bikes to dances and socializing with the kids in her class who were two years older, Christine’s parents decided to send their daughter to Allen to eliminate the possibility that she might be distracted from her studies.
The Allen School was founded in 1887 by white United Methodist missionaries, with the goal of providing talented Negro girls from Appalachian North Carolina with the best possible start in life. All the girls had “duty work assignments,” like Christine’s post at the library, a practical way to teach them responsibility and discipline. Many students came from working-class or poor families; Christine was one of the few at the school who did not receive assistance to cover the costs of tuition and board. Despite the economic circumstances of the student body, Allen was considered one of the best Negro high schools in the country. Parents from as far away as New York sent their children to Allen for its rigorous liberal arts curriculum, its religious teaching, and its insistence on imparting social graces to its students. Band leader Cab Calloway’s niece attended in the 1940s. A 1950 graduate named Eunice Waymon had made her way from North Carolina to New York and was already in the process of transforming herself into the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone.
Waves of homesickness washed over Christine in the fall of 1956, her first semester away from home. She phoned her parents every chance she could, begging them to let her return to the familiarity of Monroe. As the months rolled by, though, Christine came to love boarding school life. She opened herself to new friends, the stern but doting Methodist faculty, and the school’s routine and rituals. A charismatic eleventh-grade geometry teacher stoked her interest in math, and for the first time, she entertained the idea of a future that took advantage of her knack for numbers and all things analytical.
College, of course, wasn’t a matter of if, but where. Most Allen graduates went on to higher education, some to prestigious northern schools like Vassar and Smith. In 1956, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Virginia Tucker’s alma mater, admitted its first black students, Bettye Tillman and JoAnne Smart. In contrast to its neighbor’s militant position on segregation, North Carolina made cautious moves to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. “After careful deliberation, it is my opinion that desegregation is an idea whose hour has arrived,” said Benjamin Lee Smith, the superintendent of the Greensboro public school system.
Christine, however, decided to follow in the family tradition of attending a black college, but she had long known that she didn’t want to walk a path previously worn by her older sisters and brothers. Two of her siblings had attended Johnson C. Smith, in Charlotte; one had graduated from Tennessee State, and another from Fisk, in Nashville. Two years away from home, away from the shelter of her parents and the model of her older siblings, had given Christine the desire, and the confidence, to strike out on her own.
The summer before her senior year, Christine accompanied her friend Julia’s family to attend Julia’s older sister’s graduation from Hampton Institute. Christine didn’t know much about the school; she had barely heard the name, but during her visit, she was taken by the elegant campus and green lawns, the balmy breezes of Hampton Roads in May, and the open expanses of coast and ocean. Hampton’s student body ranged from youngsters taking their family’s first step onto the ladder of social mobility to the scions of the Talented Tenth. The school’s strict environment—mandatory chapel, study halls, evening curfew, and a dress code—were so similar to Allen’s that Christine would need no adjustment.
Living in Monroe, Christine had always been someone’s little sister. At Hampton, she thought, she would become her own woman. In the fall, she applied to the school, with Fisk as her backup plan. Hampton responded with an offer letter and a scholarship covered by the United Negro College Fund.
“I’ve been accepted at Hampton,” Christine wrote her mother in a letter in early 1958. “I have a scholarship at Hampton, and so there is no reason why you shouldn’t let me go.” Desma Mann fretted at the idea of her baby going off so far away, all alone, but she had always known that day would come. One by one, she had encouraged her children to leave Monroe. There was nothing for them there—no job, no future. Only by leaving home would her children have the chance to reach the potential she and Noah had worked hard to cultivate in them.
Christine graduated from Allen in May 1958. From the time Sputnik took flight in October 1957 until she addressed her classmates as valedictorian, the Soviets launched two more satellites, Sputnik II, carrying the space dog Laika, and Sputnik III. The United States, playing catch-up, managed to put satellites Explorer I and Vanguard I into orbit, though eight of the eleven Vanguard launches failed. The post-Sputnik lament over the lack of American scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists moved President Eisenhower to initiate the National Defense Education Act, a measure designed to cultivate the intellectual talent required to generate successes—short and longer term—in space.
While “Red engineering schools” in the Soviet Union were “loaded with women”—one-third of Soviet engineering grads were female, the Washington Post reported in 1958—the United States still struggled to find a place for women and Negroes in its science workplace, and in society at large. The restlessness that disturbed Christine’s home state in the form of student protests in Greensboro would follow her, and engage her, at Hampton Institute. And though it would take years for her to realize that Hampton would be her basic training for the “civilian army of the Cold War,” she was just months from meeting some of the successes of an earlier collision between race, gender, science, and war: Dorothy Vaughan’s children, Ann and Kenneth; Katherine Goble’s daughter, Joylette; and the children of many of the other women who had come to Hampton Roads a generation ago and made it their home.
In August Christine bade adieu to Monroe and drove north with her parents in the Hydramatic, which was more than big enough to accommodate the three of them and the possessions she needed to begin her life at Hampton. The peaks of home flattened out as they approached the coast, and then, like the first time she had come to Hampton, it came into view: the James River. She would never renounce her love for the mountains, but the James—so broad and measured as it joined the Chesapeake Bay, so different from the narrow streams that rushed through the ridges of home—took her breath away. Crossing that river as she closed in on Hampton made her feel like anything was possible.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
What a Difference a Day Makes
Well into her nineties, Katherine Goble would recall watching the winking dot of light in the sky as vividly as if it were still October 1957. She stood outside in the unseasonably warm autumn nights of that year and tracked the shiny pinpoint as it moved low across
the horizon. Around Hampton Roads and throughout America, citizens turned their eyes skyward with a mixture of terror and wonder, eager to know if the 184-pound metal sphere launched into orbit by the Russians could see them as they tried to see it from their backyards. They surfed the radio dial trying to lock on to the artificial moon’s beeping, its sound like an otherworldly cricket.
“One can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.” Those words from a letter describing a secret 1946 RAND Corporation proposal to the US Air Force, suggesting that the United States design and launch a “world circling satellite,” sounded, in 1957, like the unheeded voice of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future. In the 1940s, space research was deemed a little too far out to warrant systematic consideration and development. The Rand report gathered dust.
Now, with Sputnik circling overhead every ninety-eight minutes, Americans demanded to know how their country, so dominant in its victory in the last war, could have been surprised and usurped by a “backward peasantry” like the USSR. Panic spread from coast to coast: was it possible that the satellite was mapping the United States, with the intent of locking down targets for missile-delivered hydrogen bombs? Fear battled humiliation in the American psyche. “First in space means first, period,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. “Second in space is second in everything.” Could Sputnik signal the end of the country’s global political dominance?
In reality, the United States wasn’t trailing the Soviet Union quite as badly as it appeared in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. 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. The Americans had planned to launch the first satellite into orbit as part of the International Geophysical Year, a cooperative global science project that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. Physicists, chemists, geologists, astronomers, oceanographers, seismologists, and meteorologists from sixty countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, collaborated to collect data and conduct earth science experiments, under the mantle of peaceful interchange between East and West. Trumped by Sputnik, the Americans played catch-up. The US Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully orbited the Explorer I satellite in January 1958. Two months later, Project Vanguard, managed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, also managed to launch a satellite, though the achievement was overshadowed by Vanguard’s many rocket failures.
From where Katherine Goble was sitting, upstairs in Langley’s hangar, the Soviet move looked rather like a new beginning for the NACA nuts. Skies all over the world bore witness to four decades of successful Langley research, from passenger jets to bombers, transport planes to fighter aircraft. With supersonic military aircraft a reality, and the industry moving forward on commercial supersonic transport, it appeared that the “revolutionary advances for atmospheric aircraft” had run their course. Furthermore, Langley’s high-speed flight operations, which had been migrating over the years from the populated Hampton Roads area to isolated Dryden, in the Mojave Desert, were officially ended by a 1958 NACA headquarters edict. As Katherine and her colleagues in the Flight Research Division wondered what was next, Sputnik provided them with the answer.
Space had long been a “dirty word” for the airplane-minded Langley. Congress admonished the brain busters not to waste taxpayer money on “science fiction” and dreams of manned spaceflight. Even in the Langley Technical Library, which was arguably the world’s best collection of information on powered flight, engineers were hard-pressed to find books on spaceflight.
That didn’t stop Langley engineers from imagining how the missile bodies and rocket engines and reentry problems involved in high-speed flight research might also apply to space vehicles. Any craft that traveled into space first had to traverse the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating through the sound barrier and increasing numbers on the Mach speed dial, before escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity and settling into the eighteen-thousand-mile-per-hour speed that locked objects into low Earth orbit, following a circuit of between 134 and 584 miles above the planet. On the return trip, the vehicle skidded through the friction of the increasingly dense atmosphere, building up heat that could reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. NACA engineer Harvey Allen discovered, somewhat counterintuitively, that although the most aerodynamically streamlined shapes were best for slipping out of the atmosphere, a blunt body that increased rather than decreased air resistance was best for dissipating the extreme temperatures on the way back down.
With the US government desperate to gain a foothold in the space race, Langley now could open its garage door and display its wares for the world to see. A group that included Mary Jackson’s division chief, John Becker, advocated for a vehicle that was capable of reaching orbital speeds and then gliding back down to Earth like a traditional aircraft, an advanced version of the X-15 rocket plane. It would be an elegant solution to the problem of space, they thought, one that made the hearts of the NACA’s old-school “wing men” beat faster.
But the urgency of the competition with the Soviets created pressure to adopt the quickest, surest way into space, even if it was a little crude, or sacrificed long-term spacefaring viability for short-term earthly victory. In the Flight Research Division, Katherine Goble spent her days with her mind and her data sheets full of the specifications of real planes—not plane parts, not model planes, not disembodied wings in wind tunnels but actual vehicles that hurtled humans through the atmosphere. Flight Research’s cousins, a “notoriously freethinking” group of engineers called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division—PARD—had developed an expertise in rocketry, setting up an adjunct operation on an isolated test range on Wallops Island off the Virginia coast. Their rockets had reached speeds of Mach 15 in flight, and they were confident of their abilities to lift a payload—a satellite and a human passenger—into orbit.
As the clamor for action in space grew louder, engineers from PARD and the Flight Research Division moved to center stage. The core of the group coalescing around the US space effort shared an office with Katherine, ate sandwiches with her during lunch, and bonded with her over an enthusiasm for gust alleviation and wake turbulence. Virtually every history of the space program would include their names—John Mayer, Carl Huss, Ted Skopinski, W. H. Phillips, Chris Kraft, and others.
Katherine Goble had stood behind the engineers’ numbers for the past three years, and as humans bounded beyond the sky she would continue to do so. Like many other Americans, Katherine bridled at the reality of the Russians’ metal moon orbiting overhead. We can’t let that pass without doing something about it, she thought. But beyond sating the national pride that had been pricked by the Soviet advance, the prospect of being involved in something that was so untried, untested, and unexplored connected with Katherine’s truest self. Getting the chance to figure out how to send humans into space was fortune beyond measure. As she worked with the engineers to build a course from the warmth and safety of their home to the cold void beyond, Katherine Goble’s talents would truly take flight.
Dorothy Vaughan watched the furor from a second-floor office in the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, Building 1251. The Unitary Plan Tunnel had come online in 1955, funded by legislation to build state-of-the-art wind tunnels at each of the NACA’s three main laboratories. The team that occupied most of the new building managed its own section of computers, like all the laboratory’s divisions now.
Physically, Dorothy and the West Computing office had never been closer to the high-speed future. As the laboratory embraced the onset of the space age, the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel would remain one o
f the busiest hubs of the center, testing “nearly every supersonic airplane, missile, and spacecraft” that saw the light of day over the next two decades. But in terms of the center’s computing operations, Dorothy’s pool now existed on the periphery. By 1956, more black women were now working in other areas of the laboratory than in West Computing itself. After more than a decade in their two-room spread in the Aircraft Loads Laboratory, Dorothy and the remaining women had been downsized to the new office in 1251. Miriam Mann, Ophelia Taylor, Chubby Peddrew, and many others from West Computing’s class of 1943 had, like Katherine Goble and Mary Jackson, been offered permanent positions with engineering groups. Dorothy Vaughan was more likely to run into her former colleagues in the Langley cafeteria or the parking lot than to see them during the workday.
Dorothy had glimpsed the shadows of her own future when Langley disbanded the East Computing pool in 1947. Each new facility the laboratory built fueled the demand for specialization among its professionals. As the answers to the fundamental problems of flight became clearer, the next level of questioning required finer, more acute knowledge, making the idea of a central computing pool—generalists with mechanical calculating machines, capable of handling any type of overflow work—redundant. If anything, the NACA’s response to Sputnik would only intensify the process of change, as the herculean task of safely navigating the heavens was divided into myriad smaller tasks, tests, parts, and people. Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well. Without it, women remaining in the segregated pool were left in a state of technical limbo.
Hidden Figures Page 18