Hidden Figures
Page 21
The forces in favor of equality redoubled their efforts, determined to surmount the resistance to integration like a jet engine propelling an airplane through drag. But, like Christine Darden and everyone else whose hopes—and fears—had escalated on the day the Brown case was decided, blacks in Virginia were acutely aware of the long lag between legal and political triumphs and social change. As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.
Rather than trying to make plans based on machinations beyond their reach, parents like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Goble worked hard to influence what they did control: pushing their children to excel in their segregated schools and getting them into college. Katherine Goble’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Joylette, a talented violinist and a graceful beauty, graduated salutatorian of Carver High School’s class of 1958 and headed across town to attend Hampton Institute. Connie and Kathy, honor students and musicians in Carver High’s sophomore class, nipped at their elder sister’s heels. The girls and their mother made regular appearances in the social column of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the model of an upwardly mobile and professional black family.
In public, Katherine Goble was unfailingly gracious, optimistic, and unflappable, and she insisted that her girls acquit themselves in the same fashion. Her grief and loneliness, the burden of being both mother and father, she relegated to the privacy of their house on Mimosa Crescent. Jimmy Goble had been the love of Katherine’s youth, a nurturing father, and the partner she expected to grow old with. The two of them had been a compatible, attractive, and charming couple, making the rounds of the black community’s fall galas, debutante balls, picnics, and fund-raisers. As a single woman, still youthful at forty years old, she found herself drifting toward the social sidelines.
Eunice Smith was Katherine’s steadfast companion and confidante. The two of them spent more time together than many married couples, commuting back and forth to work each day, serving together as officers of the Newport News chapter of their sorority, AKA, taking time off from work to root for their teams in the yearly Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) basketball tournament for black colleges. They never missed Sunday service at Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church, and one night a week when they left Langley they headed over to Carver for choir practice.
One evening in 1958, a handsome thirty-three-year-old army captain with a ready smile and a rich bass voice ambled into practice. James A. Johnson, born in rural Suffolk, Virginia, had moved with his family to Hampton as an adolescent. He attended Phenix High School, and in fact Mary Jackson had been one of his student teachers. Jim Johnson had planned to attend Hampton Institute but was drafted right after graduating from high school. Rather than being assigned to the US Naval Training School there on the campus, he was sent to the US Navy Boot Camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. He trained in aviation metalsmithing, specializing in the repair of propellers. After his war service, Johnson finished his degree and landed a clerk job at the Commerce Department in Washington, DC, but he also signed up for the US Navy Reserve so he could spend his weekends at Patuxent River Naval Base in Maryland, repairing planes used for test flight. With the onset of the Korean War, he enlisted in the army, serving as an artillery sergeant, calibrating guns being fired on enemy infantry. In 1956, he returned to Hampton, taking a job at the post office as a mail carrier, maintaining his trim military shape through miles of walking each day. Never one to stray too far from the armed services, he also signed up as a member of the US Army Reserve.
“Ladies, he’s single,” the pastor had announced in church that Sunday after introducing Jim as a new member of the congregation. It hadn’t been Katherine’s expectation or intention to find a new love, but almost immediately after meeting in the choir loft, she and Jim began courting, tentatively turning up together at dances and dinner parties and arriving together at church as a family, with Kathy and Connie in tow.
Jim’s devotion to the military service made it easy for him to understand Katherine’s strong commitment to her work at Langley. He knew the satisfaction that came from fulfilling employment and loved the sense of mission and camaraderie that the military gave him. As a black man, he relished the opportunity to step forward from the cook and steward and laborer jobs that had traditionally been reserved for blacks and gain expertise in an area where he felt he could make a frontline contribution.
He was also sensitive to the secretive nature of Katherine’s work and the longer hours her job now demanded of her. Since the end of World War II, the NACA had been an eight-to-four-thirty kind of place. Now, at the outset of the space race, leaving the building at ten o’clock would be a good night. In a less urgent scenario, NASA personnel might have taken a more NACA-like approach to the problem of space by conducting a careful, measured investigation of all possible options for space travel and recommending the ones with the greatest long-term potential. There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government’s decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species. With the Russians off to what looked like a commanding lead, it was the simplest, fastest, and most reliable approach that began to take shape as NASA teased out the limitations, interdependencies, contingencies, and unknowns they faced. The engineers approached Project Mercury the way engineers tackled any problem: they broke Project Mercury down into its constituent parts.
The spacecraft itself, the can that would take a man into space, was the brainchild of Dorothy Lee’s boss, Maxime Faget. Aerodynamic theory and intuition suggested that the rocket and spacecraft combination should be as streamlined as possible, to minimize aerodynamic drag. Since the Wright Brothers’ 1915 Flyer, airplanes had evolved from pelican-like awkwardness to sleek machines with the silhouette of a falcon; why wouldn’t a spaceship continue along that same path? But tests by Harvey Allen, an engineer at the NACA’s Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, showed that needle-shaped structures wouldn’t be able to deflect the extreme heat caused when they zoomed through the friction of the atmosphere. A blunt-shaped body—something shaped more like a champagne cork—would create a shock wave as it came back toward Earth, dissipating the heat and keeping (they hoped) the man inside safe. Faget put Allen’s insight to work in the design of the Mercury space capsule, six feet wide and nearly eleven feet long, weighing three thousand pounds.
The selection process for astronauts would be limited to candidates small enough to fit into the lunchbox of a spaceship: only men at or under five feet, eleven inches tall and weighing less than 180 pounds were considered. Each was required to be a qualified test pilot under forty years old with at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1959, NASA held a press conference to present the “Mercury Seven” astronauts to the world. Four of the seven selected—Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and John Glenn—had graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, where Katherine’s new beau, Jim Johnson, had worked as a mechanic. NASA installed the astronauts in an office at Langley next door to the Space Task Group and proceeded to put them through physical training and classroom instruction in engineering and astronautics. Employees stayed alert to catch a glimpse of the Mercury Seven, who had gone from anonymous military men to among the most recognizable faces in the world. Computers working in the Space Task Group and the astronauts, whose office was located in the same building, often ran into each other going to and coming from the bathrooms.
The rockets NASA needed to blast spacemen and spacecraft into space would come from the army’s existing inventory of Redstone and Atlas missiles, overseen by Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The propulsion experts at NASA’s laboratory in Cleveland took the lead on the craft’s elec
trical system and the retrofire rockets built into the craft itself.
To the engineers on Katherine’s desk fell the responsibility of the trajectories, tracing out in painstaking detail the exact path that the spacecraft would travel across Earth’s surface from the second it lifted off the launchpad until the moment it splashed down in the Atlantic. As the head of the Space Task Group, Robert Gilruth had been given his pick of NASA employees to fill the ranks of Project Mercury’s nerve center. Katherine’s office mate, John Mayer, had jumped ship for the new endeavor a week after it was created, in November 1958. The workload generated by Project Mercury was so onerous that even after Mayer transferred from 1244 to the offices on the East Side, he “bootlegged” the overflow work to his old buddies Carl Huss and Ted Skopinski, getting them to help out with whatever time they could squeeze in around what they owed to Henry Pearson. He got them to do “computing runs” for him—which meant getting Katherine to do computing runs for them. The group took on the additional tasks with zeal, because space looked like “a hell of a lot of fun.” They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations, scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.
There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians. Like Katherine and her colleagues at Langley, women at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland spent thousands upon thousands of woman-hours computing ballistics trajectory tables, which soldiers used to accurately calibrate and fire their weapons, as Jim Johnson had in Korea. The first attempt to put a man into space, NASA decided, should be a simple ballistic flight, with the capsule fired into space by a rocket like a bullet from a gun or a tennis ball from a tennis ball machine. Capsule goes up, capsule comes down, its path defined by a big parabola, its landing place the Atlantic Ocean. The astronaut needed to return near enough to waiting navy ships to be quickly hoisted out of the water and pulled to safety. The challenge was to rig the machine’s position so that the ball—the Mercury capsule—landed as closely as possible to the navy’s waiting racket. Calculated incorrectly, the ball would go out of bounds, the astronaut’s life endangered. The math had to be as precise and accurate as an Althea Gibson serve.
A well-executed suborbital flight would buy the United States a little breathing room; but orbital flight—the end game of Project Mercury—was infinitely more complex. Successful orbital flight required the engineers to adjust the tennis ball machine’s chute to the correct angle and arm its launcher with enough force to send the ball up through the atmosphere and into an orbit around Earth on a path so precisely specified, so true, that when it came back down through the atmosphere, it was still within spitting distance of the navy’s waiting racket.
“Let me do it,” Katherine said to Ted Skopinski. Working with Skopinski as a computer (or “math aide,” as the women had been renamed when the NACA became NASA), she had proven herself to be as reliable with numbers as a Swiss timepiece and deft with higher-level conceptual work. She was older than many of the space pilgrims, some of whom were just out of college, but she matched them at every turn for enthusiasm and work stamina. The fellas were putting everything they had on the line, and she was not going to be left out. “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up,” she said.
Her grasp of analytical geometry was as good as that of the guys she worked with, perhaps better. And the unyielding demands of Project Mercury and the sprawling, still-forming organization that was being built to manage it stretched everyone to the limit. Soon after John Mayer put on the Space Task Group jersey, Carl Huss and Ted Skopinski followed suit, making Katherine the natural inheritor of the research report that would describe Project Mercury’s orbital flight. As had been the case many other times in her life, Katherine Goble was the right person in the right place at the right moment.
Sitting in the emptier office, she plunged into the analysis, although the pesky laws of physics turned an afternoon of rote celestial tennis practice into a forces free-for-all. Earth’s gravity exerted its force on the satellite and had to be accounted for in the trajectory’s system of equations. Earth’s oblateness—the fact that it was not perfectly spherical but slightly squat, like a mandarin orange—needed to be specified, as did the speed of the planet’s rotation. Even if the capsule were to shoot off into the air directly overhead and come back down in the same straight line, it would land in a different spot, because Earth had moved.
“In the recovery of an artificial earth satellite it is necessary to bring the satellite over a preselected point above the earth from which the reentry is to be initiated,” she wrote. Equation 3 described the satellite’s velocity. Equation 19 fixed the longitude position of the satellite at time T. Equation A3 accounted for errors in longitude. Equation A8 adjusted for Earth’s west-to-east rotation and oblation. She conferred with Ted Skopinski, consulted her textbooks, and did her own plotting. Over the months of 1959, the thirty-four-page end product took shape: twenty-two principal equations, nine error equations, two launch case studies, three reference texts (including Forest Ray Moulton’s 1914 book), two tables with sample calculations, and three pages of charts.
The rapidly growing Space Task Group was taking shape as an autonomous unit marching out in front of the space parade. The new endeavor consumed as many person-hours as it could be given. Even as the Space Task Group worked to create boundaries with the research center that had given birth to it, Space Task Group employees still had responsibilities to their old managers. Katherine’s and Ted Skopinski’s Azimuth Angle report was the work of the Flight Research Group, the responsibility of their branch chief, Henry Pearson, and while Ted Skopinski was increasingly out of sight, spending time over at the STG offices on the East Side, the report, still unfinished, was not out of Henry Pearson’s mind.
“Katherine should finish the report,” Skopinski said to Pearson. “She’s done most of the work anyway.” Henry Pearson had the reputation of being less than supportive of the advancement of female employees, but whether it was circumstance, the triumph of hard work over bias, or an incorrectly deserved reputation, it was on his watch that Katherine put the finishing touches on her first research report on the Friday after Thanksgiving 1959. “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position” went through ten months of editorial meetings, analysis, recommendations, and revisions before publication in September 1960—the first report to come out of Langley’s Aerospace Mechanics Division (or its predecessor, the Flight Research Division) by a female author. Stepped on, turned out, pulled apart, and subjected to every stress test the editorial committees could throw at it, Katherine’s road map would help lead NASA to the day when the balance of the space race was tipped in favor of the United States.
For Katherine, the report commemorated the beginning of a new phase not just at Langley but in her personal life. Somehow, during the long, bleary-eyed days of 1959, she accepted an offer even more enticing than being invited into the editorial meetings: Jim Johnson’s marriage proposal. The two married in August 1959 in a quiet ceremony at Carver Memorial. When she signed her first research report, she used a new name, the name that history would remember: Katherine G. Johnson.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Model Behavior
Mary Jackson scrutinized every aspect of the model—its smoothness, its symmetry and alignment, its weight distribution—her trained eye and intuition sensitive to anything that might lower its aerodynamic fitness. This had been a project of nights and weekends, but she knew this investigation would provide results much more quickly than any research currently underway in the Four-foot Supersonic Tunnel. The bar had been set the year before by an engineer in the Aerospace Mechanics Division—Katherine Johnson’s group—but Mary and her young collaborator were more than up to the challenge. She was ready to spend all the time it took to help her son, Levi, build a humd
inger of a car to race in the peninsula’s 1960 soap box derby.
Since the beginning of the year, Mary had spent hours, hundreds of them, perhaps, collaborating with her thirteen-year-old son the way she worked with Kazimierz Czarnecki. She and Levi had gone to the local Chevrolet dealer to fill out the entry form and pick up a copy of the official rules, which read like a familiarization manual for an airplane. “The car and driver together must weigh less than 250 pounds. Only rubber wheels allowed. Length shall not exceed 80 inches. Road clearance must be at least three inches with the driver in the car. The total cost of the car shall not exceed $10.00, exclusive of wheels and axles.” They absorbed the restrictions and made sketches and measurements, trying out different designs until they settled on the best specification. Then they hunted for the materials that would bring their sketch to life. Buried in the clutter at the back of the garage might be a treasure in disguise: vegetable crates, plywood, orphaned wagon wheels, garden tools, old shoes, wire and twine—just about anything could prove useful to building the car, given enough creativity. Gluing, nailing, screwing, and fitting ensued as the big race, held annually over the July Fourth holiday weekend, approached. Mary helped her son refine the vehicle until they possessed something that could roll down the street with its pilot, as the racers were known, in the driver’s seat.
The final step was to smooth, sand, and polish the body of the car to within an inch of its home-built life. All the derby’s matches started at the top of a hill, with no pushing allowed. Levi and his competitors would set off from the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge in Newport News, virtually the only thing that could pass as a hill in the flat-as-a-pancake coastal terrain. As the pilots released their brakes, they hunched themselves as far down as they could into their vehicle’s cockpit, imploring the gods of gravity to pull them as quickly as possible down the nine-hundred-foot racecourse, hoping to do righteous battle against air resistance, which was as much the foe of the pee-wee racer as it had been for Chuck Yeager. No one knew that better than Levi’s technical consultant, who managed to sneak in the occasional sponsored moment about the wonders of a career in the sciences in the midst of the building fun.