“Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth,” President Kennedy said.
He applauded Shepard and then asked Congress for the funds to support an ambitious new space goal, which he laid out next:
“First, I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
The moon? President Kennedy was right about the difficulty part. Our space team had not yet even caught up to the Soviets with a successful orbital flight, yet he was already pushing us to the moon. The president asked Congress to approve a whopping seven billion to nine billion dollars in funds over the next five years to accomplish that goal. It soon became clear that President Kennedy’s monumental vision was bigger than Langley could handle. Congress approved the funds to build the new Manned Spacecraft Center, and in August 1961 the official search for the Space Task Group’s new home began. Though Langley officials campaigned to keep the heart of the space operation, nearly two dozen other sites were considered. Houston ultimately got the nod. Historians later would point to the influence of some powerful Texans, including the one who sat at the president’s right hand, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson ascended to the presidency, and a decade later, the Houston space center would be named in his honor.
My former officemates Ted, John, and Carl all followed the Space Task Group to Houston, and I was asked to join them. Working with those guys had been exhilarating, and I gave the move some serious thought. But when I talked to Jim about it, we both concluded that we could not move so far away from the girls and our extended families, who all were no more than a few minutes or a few hours away by car. The Newport News area had become my home, and for the foreseeable future, it would stay that way.
Even as the Space Task Group made plans to move, the group members never stopped working. And neither did the rest of us. My days of working a straight, eight-hour shift and making it home in time for dinner every night went away with NACA. I was spending longer hours at work, and sometimes I’d even have to return to work after dinner. I appreciated that my husband, as a military man, understood not just the secretive nature of my work, but also the long hours of commitment. Just two months after the first suborbital flight, our space team launched a second one with astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, a US Air Force pilot and war veteran, piloting the spacecraft. The flight, on July 21, 1961, was officially dubbed Mercury-Redstone 4, and Grissom nicknamed it Liberty Bell 7. After fifteen minutes and thirty seconds, the flight landed in the Atlantic Ocean and almost ended in disaster when the capsule’s hatch blew off. We all breathed easier when a helicopter pulled Grissom out of the water. The capsule, which already had begun filling with water by the time the rescue effort began, was too heavy for the helicopter to lift and could not be salvaged.
With every flight, every mistake, every correction, every test and retest, Project Mercury moved closer to its ultimate goal of manned orbital flight. Meanwhile, another transition was in the making, and it would significantly change my world: the growing use of electronic computers. When NACA purchased its first “electronic calculator” from Bell Telephone Laboratories back in 1947, that should have signaled what was to come. The huge machine took up an entire room and noisily coughed up answers to the engineers’ equations for transonic flight research. But its advantage was as commanding as its size: speed. In just a few hours, the calculator could perform a task that took humans a month to complete. Plus it could work all night without a break.
A few years later, in the early 1950s, NACA purchased its first IBM computers, an IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch and the IBM 650, to speed the processing of data in its Finance Division. But researchers soon expanded the machines’ use to other things, including trajectory calculations. These were the early days of computers, and for all their speed, the machines made too many mistakes to earn the immediate trust of those who were risking their lives to advance the nation’s space goals. But Dorothy Vaughan, the former head of the West Computers, had looked at the monstrous machines and caught a glimpse of the future. She’d taken classes in the evenings and on weekends and learned Fortran, the computer programming language that enabled her to feed the engineers’ complex equations into the machine and translate the answers that it spit out. By 1960, Langley had consolidated its electronic computers and those who operated them into the Analysis and Computation Division to serve all of the research departments. Dorothy had landed there as a computer programmer, joining other Negro and white women who had worked as human computers.
Each generation of electronic computers grew more sophisticated, more powerful. By the end of 1960, the IBM 704 had been installed at Langley in the Analysis and Computation Division, and two IBM 7090 computers had been sent to a NASA facility in Washington, DC. The computers arrived just before the first scheduled launch of Project Mercury’s orbital flight. But that date and several others would come and go as the engineers conducted more tests, fixed glitches, worked on the worldwide communications network, and did all they could to prevent a disastrous end. While they worked, the Soviets sent yet another of its cosmonauts, Gherman Titov, into space on October 6, 1961, for a record-breaking seventeen orbits. He spent an entire day in space, long enough to take photographs, experience a kind of motion sickness that caused him to vomit, and even fall asleep. As news of the Soviets’ most recent exploits in space made it to the United States, NASA once again was at the center of public criticism and doubt about its ability to overcome the opponent’s dominance in the skies.
Astronaut John Glenn, a former US Marines test pilot, had been the one anointed to carry out Project Mercury’s ultimate goal of orbital flight. The nation’s hopes were pinned on him also to resurrect the prospect that the United States could someday reign in the realm beyond Earth. And John Glenn had long been ready. He had hoped to be the first man in space, but instead he would become the first in orbit. He prepared himself meticulously, staying in top physical shape, submitting himself to regular monitoring by doctors, practicing his water exit from the capsule repeatedly, and participating in hundreds of simulated missions. After multiple delays, his date with the skies was all set: February 20, 1962.
John Glenn had been nearly obsessive about checking and rechecking every aspect of the flight that he could control. As he went through his last flight simulation, he had a final request of the engineers. He needed assurance that the trajectory plotted by the powerful IBM 7090 computer was correct.
“Get the girl to check the numbers,” he instructed.
I was sitting at my desk when the phone call came in to one of the guys. He sat close enough for me to overhear his side of the conversation and figure out what was about to happen. As the engineer relayed the request to me, I remained calm. This was a major assignment, but I had done this long before the computer made it seem simple. So I quickly assembled my meager supplies and got busy on my calculator, working out every equation by hand for the trajectory of a mission that was scheduled to include three orbits. The computer had figured it out, but I was the error checker, the last stop. This was a meticulous task with no room for error. And digit after mind-exhausting digit, I computed, filling a thick pile of data sheets. Every step of the way, I paused to check my numbers against the computer’s to make sure there was agreement. I even carried out the calculations a couple of decimal points beyond the computer’s numbers. One and a half days later, I finally finished. I took a long, deep breath. The numbers agreed. Our astronaut was ready to go.
The space team had dec
ided to use the newer, faster Atlas rocket to boost Glenn’s Friendship 7 flight from Cape Canaveral into space (a decision that the Hidden Figures movie attached to me, I suppose to add to the drama). The launch, initially scheduled for December 1961, was delayed four times because of mechanical issues or poor weather conditions. Then finally, just before 9:47 a.m. EST on February 20, a live television audience of about 135 million people watched and listened as Mission Control performed its final system checks.
“May the good Lord ride all the way,” test conductor Tom O’Malley said.
Scott Carpenter, who had been selected as the backup astronaut for the flight, added, “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
With that, Friendship 7, carrying America’s astronaut, was blasted into the heavens. I watched with butterflies in my stomach from a television in the office. The takeoff looked perfect. I waited, worked, and waited some more. Then, after four hours, fifty-five minutes, twenty-three seconds, and three orbits around the Earth, the broadcast returned to the ocean splash-down, which looked perfect, too. The capsule landed just about forty miles off target, and I later learned that was because it carried the unanticipated added weight of the rocket, which had stayed in place. Near the end of the second orbit, a capsule alert had indicated that the spacecraft’s heat shield was loose. Without it, the capsule and its passenger quickly would have succumbed to the overwhelming heat, about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, as they headed back down to Earth. But Mission Control had made an on-the-spot decision, instructing Glenn not to jettison the rocket, as planned, with the hope that it would keep the heat shield in place. It may have been a life-saving decision. Glenn also had overcome a problem with the automatic control system by switching to manual and operating it himself.
After the successful mission, Americans couldn’t get enough of our newest space hero. Tens of thousands of Hampton and Newport News residents lined the streets a few weeks later to celebrate Glenn, who rode in the first of a fifty-five-vehicle motorcade that also included the six other astronauts and their families. Leaving from Langley, the parade traveled twenty-two miles, passing all of the familiar landmarks, including the shipyard and Hampton Institute. I watched with some of the engineers at Langley. The parade ended at Darling Stadium, where another jubilant crowd was waiting.
John Glenn had caught us up to the Soviets. Now the Space Race seemed ours to win.
Many have asked me over the years whether John Glenn ever knew my name. Who knows? It didn’t matter to me then, and it doesn’t now. It was enough for me that I knew when he needed “the girl” to boost his confidence that he could entrust his life to the heavens and get him back home, I was that girl. I loved my job more than ever. And I felt blessed to be her.
Chapter 9
Shoot for the Moon
Somehow, word got out in the Negro press that I had played a role in John Glenn’s historic flight. Back then, Negro newspapers and magazines, especially Ebony and Jet were how we kept up with what was going on with our people. The other media acted as if we didn’t exist, except for crime stories. Practically every Negro home had copies of Ebony on the coffee table. The magazine showed us at our best in all colors, from the brightest beige to the deepest chocolate. The stories and photos gave us a glimpse of the high life of our dreams. Some ladies wore their hair, chose their outfits, and decorated their homes like something they saw in Ebony. Negro newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide spoke our truth. They told us the horror of Emmett Till’s murder and sent reporters to Little Rock Central High School and the student sit-ins in North Carolina long before the white media figured out they were stories worth covering. They questioned why Negro soldiers were fighting for freedom abroad for a country that treated them as second-class citizens at home. They wrote about our marriages, our deaths, and our sons and daughters graduating from college or receiving a military honor. So when a reporter called me from the Pittsburgh Courier sometime after John Glenn’s flight to interview me for a story, I was at once a bit surprised, nervous, and somewhat confused. I didn’t talk much about my job outside of the office, and it was the first time that my work was being recognized as something special. It was work to me, but perhaps a story could inspire a young person to consider a career as a mathematician. So I agreed to the interview.
When I saw the story on March 10, 1962, in the national edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, I was shocked. There was a big photo of me stretched three columns across the front page. The headline read, “Lady Mathematician Played Key Role in Glenn Space Flight,” and the story on an inside page called me “one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the present era.” Oh my, I thought. This was too much. But it was a very positive story, and I liked that it mentioned Joylette was editor in chief of the Hampton Script newspaper in her senior year at the Institute. I wish it had mentioned my other two talented daughters as well.
Just beneath the story, another headline asked, “Why No Negro Astronauts?” The article actually focused on the comments of a school desegregation attorney named Paul B. Zuber, who criticized the federal government for failing to select a Negro in the pool of astronauts. NASA responded that the selection of astronauts had nothing to do with race but with qualifications and that there would be Negro astronauts in the future when more Negroes entered the science fields. I looked forward to that day. Times were changing, and the next generation of Negroes would be able to aim higher than they could see, maybe even as high as the moon.
I was seeing evidence of the changing times in my own family as Joylette prepared to enter the work world. Before graduating from Hampton Institute, she had decided that she didn’t want to follow the traditional path of college-educated Negroes into the classroom to teach. In my generation, most Negroes with degrees in subject areas such as math and science had few other options but to teach. But in the spring of her senior year of college, Joylette applied to NASA for a job as a mathematician. Then a flurry of major life events happened for her at once. She graduated from college on June 6, 1962, and sixteen days later eloped with her college sweetheart, Lawrence Hylick. Lawrence had asked Jim and me for Joylette’s hand in marriage months earlier, on Christmas. We were happy for them and agreed wholeheartedly. But the couple told no one about their wedding plans and held a secret ceremony in the chapel on Hampton Institute’s campus, where they’d met.
Lawrence, who had another year to complete at the Institute, was set to travel out of town for a couple of months to ROTC summer camp, and the two of them decided to get married before he left. The news was quite a surprise, but they were two young adults in love and in a hurry to start their lives together. I certainly knew something about that. At about the same time, Joylette got more good news—she had landed the job at NASA. She joined me at Langley just four days after her secret wedding. My oldest daughter was now a mathematician, like me. She worked at NASA, like me. And she had started right out of college. That showed me how important it is for young people to be able to see in the flesh a vision of what they could become. But it also showed me how critical it is for those with influence—parents, teachers, and mentors—to help those who look to them for guidance to envision for themselves what may seem impossible. Dr. Claytor’s vision for me had in essence given birth to two generations of mathematicians. He had opened my mind and my dreams to a job I never even knew existed, and by watching me go to work at Langley every day, my daughter knew she didn’t have to become a teacher if that wasn’t her heart’s desire. Now, that made me feel proud.
When Lawrence returned from summer camp, Jim and I planned to host a reception for the newlyweds in the backyard of our house on Mimosa Crescent. But early on the morning of the planned celebration, August 3, 1962, a relative called with tragic news. My nephew, Lieutenant Eric Epps Jr., the oldest son of Margaret (my deceased husband Jimmie’s sister), and Eric Epps Sr. had been killed in a military plane crash. Margaret and Eric Sr. were the couple who had invited
Jimmie, the girls, and me to Newport News all those years ago. The oldest of three boys, Eric Jr.—“Skippy” to us—was so bashful that when Jimmie, the girls, and I walked into the back door of their home for the first time, he and his two brothers dashed out the front door. But the Epps boys got to know their cousins, and the children soon were inseparable. Skippy always loved planes, and his parents nurtured the notion that a smart, curious Negro boy could grow up and fly planes someday. Model planes hung from the ceiling in his bedroom. This was in the early 1950s, just about a decade after Tuskegee Institute produced its first class of Negro pilots through the federal government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program. The federal government had financed the program at colleges and flight schools throughout the country in a desperate attempt to train more pilots for what appeared to be an inevitable third world war. HBCUs were not initially included because the prevailing attitude was that our people were not intelligent enough to learn how to fly planes. But after criticism from Negro newspapers and activists, the federal government conceded and included select HBCUs in the program. I’ve always been proud that my alma mater, West Virginia State, was among the first six schools selected in 1939 to start an aviation training program. It was led by the university’s vocational and technical director, Mr. James Evans, who had played such an important role in my life. Tuskegee was selected, too, and as its program quickly expanded to train commercial pilots and then officers for the Army Air Corps, West Virginia State and the other schools became feeder schools into Tuskegee’s airman training program. Two graduates of West Virginia State’s program—George “Spanky” Roberts and Mac Ross—were among the first five to complete Tuskegee’s program and become fighter pilots and commanding officers in the US Army. The Negro community, and especially those of us connected to West Virginia State and Tuskegee, were so proud of the airmen. Tuskegee trained an estimated eleven hundred combat pilots, who would go on to serve with unmatched distinction in World War II and change minds across the nation about the intelligence and academic abilities of Negroes.
My Remarkable Journey Page 16