An excerpt from People -
The Inspiring True Story of Hidden Figures: Meet the Real NASA Mathematicians Who Got Man on the Moon
The movie based on Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson was the top-grossing Oscar-nominated film of 2017
By Nicole Briese
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Taraji P. Henson in Hidden Figures (2016) ; NASA space scientist, and mathematician Katherine Johnson at NASA Langley Research Center in 1966 in Hampton, Virginia.
Credit : Hopper Stone/Twentieth Century Fox ; NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty
Hidden Figures may have been a box office sensation thanks to its leading ladies Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, but it was the story of the real NASA women behind the film that captivated the world.
The behind-the-scenes calculations done by mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson became instrumental to the space race missions headed by astronauts such as John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth), Alan Shepard (the first American in space) and Neil Armstrong (the first person to walk on the moon).
"These [women] are our true American heroes," Monáe, who portrayed Jackson in the three-time Oscar-nominated movie told CNN. "It's because of them that we can have that as America. We can feel proud that we achieved something so extraordinary."
More than nailing their numbers, the real-life women behind the characters, known as “calculators” in the NASA Langley Research Center where they worked, were pioneers of the workforce, overcoming gender and race discrimination to break glass ceilings in their field.
Johnson gave Henson and co. her stamp of approval, telling the Los Angeles Times of the film, “It was well-done. The three leading ladies did an excellent job portraying us.”
Keep reading to find out the inspired true story of Hidden Figures, from its historically accurate events to its inspiring real-life trailblazers.
Who was Katherine Johnson?
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| Katherine Johnson. | NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty |
Creola Katherine Johnson, known as the “human computer,” was a mathematician who worked for NASA from 1953 to 1986.
Having entered high school at the age of 10, she graduated summa cum laude from college at age 18 per the organization. “I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed ... anything that could be counted, I did,” she later recalled to NASA.
The Virginia school teacher went on to become the first Black woman to integrate into West Virginia University’s graduate school in 1939, though she left prematurely to focus on her family with husband James Goble. Johnson later married James A. Johnson following Goble’s death in 1956.
After joining NASA in 1953, Johnson continued to make history. In 1960, she co-authored a report with a NASA engineer, marking the first time a woman in her flight research division had ever been credited on a research report. “The movie and book were pretty accurate. Women did not have their names included as authors on technical [papers] in the early days,” Johnson later told the Los Angeles Times.
According to the institution, Johnson’s calculations were instrumental in supporting some of the biggest milestones in aeronautic history. She contributed a trajectory analysis for Freedom 7, the first American spacecraft to carry a person into space in 1961. She also famously ran hand calculations confirming the computerized orbital equations that controlled the trajectory of Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission — the first to orbit Earth — in 1962.
In later years, Johnson worked on what she went on to cite as her greatest contribution to space: her calculations for the organization’s Apollo projects, including the lunar module (the lander spacecraft that allowed for Apollo 11’s first flight to the Moon), the Apollo 11 mission, and the Apollo 13 mission, for which she provided contingency procedures that allowed its astronauts to get home safely when its equipment malfunctioned.
She also reportedly worked on calculations for the fourth human space flight program, a.k.a. the Space Shuttle program, and helped create plans for a mission to Mars.
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