Johnson’s work was held in such high regard in its time that Glenn, who died on Thursday, was aware of it. ![]() Henson stars as Katherine Johnson, the 2015 National Medal of Freedom recipient who calculated the trajectory for America’s first trip to space with Alan Shepherd’s 1961 mission Spencer as Johnson’s supervisor, Dorothy Vaughan and Monáe as Mary Jackson, who rose from mathematician to engineer to the mentor for women and minorities.Ī pivotal scene in the film features Glenn. The film is based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book by the same name, which spans several decades and characters at Langley. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, tells the story of three women from the pool. Their work barely earned a mention in pop culture space tributes until this year, thanks to a best-selling novel and a forthcoming film that’s getting major Oscar buzz. Black women played a crucial role in the pool, providing mathematical data for NASA’s first successful space missions, including Glenn’s pioneering orbital spaceflight. That’s right: humans, namely women, comprised the workforce known as the “ Computer Pool” before the arrival of electronic data processors, aka, computers in the 1960s. It wasn’t long before then that the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, used “ computers in skirts” to do all the number-crunching. By the time NASA was preparing to send John Glenn into space computers were used to calculate launch conditions.
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