Mission control decides to land it after three orbits instead of seven. Stafford, showing a change of heart, brings Katherine a cup of coffee.Īfter a successful launch and orbit, the space capsule has a heat shield problem. However, Harrison gives her a security pass, so she can attend the liftoff. She quickly does so, only to have the door slammed in her face after delivering the results to the control room. On the day of the launch, Harrison discovers discrepancies in the IBM 7090 calculations for the capsule’s landing coordinates, and Astronaut Glenn requests that Katherine be called in to check them. Katherine’s colleagues give her a pearl necklace, the only jewelry allowed under the dress code and one that she doesn’t already have. Vaughan,” indicating her new-found respect.Īs the final arrangements for John Glenn’s launch are made, Katherine is reassigned to her old group because the Task Force will rely on calculations from the IBM. Mitchell eventually addresses Dorothy as “Mrs. After teaching herself programming and training her co-workers, she is officially promoted to supervise the Programming Department, but not before securing employment for 30 of her co-workers with her. Later, she visits a public library, where the librarian scolds her for visiting the whites-only section, to borrow a book about Fortran. She visits the computer room to learn about it, and successfully starts the machine. Meanwhile, Mary goes to court and convinces the judge to grant her permission to attend night classes in an all-white school to obtain her engineering degree.ĭorothy learns of the impending installation of an IBM 7090 electronic computer that could replace human computers. Despite this, Katherine is forced to remove her name from the reports, which are credited solely to Stafford. When Harrison finds out that Katherine is forced to walk a half mile to another building to use the bathroom, he becomes enraged and ends bathroom segregation by knocking down the “Colored Bathroom” sign and announcing “We all pee the same color.” Harrison allows Katherine to be included in the briefings, where she creates an equation to guide the space capsule during re-entry. The Mercury 7 astronauts visit Langley, and astronaut John Glenn makes a point of greeting the people supporting the mission, including the African American computers. Harrison invites his team to solve a complex mathematical equation, and Katherine develops the solution, leaving him impressed. With encouragement from the team leader, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, she submits an application for an official NASA engineer position and begins to pursue an engineering degree. Mary is assigned to the space capsule heat shield team, and immediately identifies a flaw. Katherine’s new colleagues initially dismiss her, especially head engineer Paul Stafford.ĭorothy is told she won’t be promoted to supervisor of the group of African American women computers (who do complex computations, not the machines) because there are no plans to assign a permanent supervisor for their group. ![]() ![]() She becomes the first black woman on that team. Al Harrison, the director of the Space Task Group, needs someone who can perform analytic geometry, and Katherine is the only one who can do it. ![]() In 1961, mathematician Katherine Goble works as a human computer in the segregated division of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, alongside her colleagues, aspiring engineer Mary Jackson and their unofficial acting-supervisor Dorothy Vaughan.įollowing the successful Soviet launch of Yuri Gagarin, pressure to send American astronauts into space increases. Here’s a synopsis of the documentary adapted from Wikipedia. The screenplay is by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book.Ĭlick here for the Foolscap Global Story Grid. Download the Math of Storytelling Infographicīack for Season 2, the Roundtablers lift off into the Performance genre this week with the 2015 Oscar nominee Hidden Figures, which tells the story of three remarkable African-American women and their real-life achievements in the face of racism and mysoginy at NASA.
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