How Black Woman accelerated the Space Race
Tags: Black Women, BlackLivesMatter, NASA, Space, Space Exploration

A white man may have landed on the moon, but the works of black women paved his way there.

On the 20th of July 1969, it was official; ‘the Eagle had landed’ on the moon and with that, the United States won the twenty-year Space Race against the Soviet Union. It was unprecedented, the reality of man on the moon was absurd, it was ‘the fulfilment of a dream which men have shared since the beginning of recorded history’.

For almost half a century, the astronauts who boosted America’s position in the Space Race were rewarded with showers of praise and esteem. Meanwhile, those who worked day and night, making the necessary calculations of orbital mechanics to get man in space, remained starved of any form of applause. They were mathematicians, physicists and engineers. They were the ‘human computers’ of NASA who remained uncredited and hidden for the bulk of history. They were women, most of whom were black.

The human computers of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics were women with degrees in physics and mathematics, recruited to replace the men who had gone to fight in the war. As the severity of the war intensified, and more and more manpower needed to be replaced, more women from minorities were recruited as a temporary way to boost production.

Even though more women from minorities had been included in NACA’s workforce, African American women were still citizens of Jim Crow’s America and as such, had to be segregated from their white counterparts in the ‘West Area’ while the white mathematicians worked in the ‘East section’.

All the ‘West Computers’ were black women who worked as female engineers for NASA from 1943 to 1958- when ‘the computer wore a skirt’. Contained in a secret office with less-than-ideal working conditions, the black human computers of the West Area Computing unit performed a plethora of mathematical equations and calculations by hand.

And as Black women in Jim Crow’s America, they were confronted with a combination of overt sexism and racism. They were underworked, underpaid, and though they had the same number of qualifications as their white counterparts, were regarded as being ‘subprofessionals’ as a way to justify their mistreatment. It was also a lot more difficult for a black woman to become a human-computer than it was for a white woman, as NACA often made the black applicants prove their competency further with the completion of a supplementary chemistry course at a nearby university.

The West computing area was undoubtedly inferior to the East section; all communal areas such as the bathrooms and dining facilities were segregated between race, and the facilities for the African American women were old, neglected, and subpar. It was only when NACA made the transition to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in 1858 that all the segregated facilities of the East and West Computing Area were abolished.

Katherine Johnson was the most well-known of the West Area Computers- the woman responsible for getting NACA into space. Starting high school at the tender of 13, Katherine was somewhat of a ‘child prodigy’. It was her brilliance with numbers that made her one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools. With her PhD in mathematics, Johnson worked as a mathematician and a human-computer at NACA’s West Computing Area since its establishment, performing complex calculations, calculating and plotting data; the most tedious work on NACA’s workforce.

The 1957 launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik infuriated President John F. Kennedy and US citizens akin, coaxing NACA to accelerate America’s position in the Space Race. In 1958, Johnson was promoted to a position in the Space Force Task where she could plot data and carry out calculations for the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology.

Having completed the operations beautifully, Johnson went on to complete the trajectory analysis for NASA’s 1961 mission Freedom 7 done by Alan Shepherd, America’s first spaceflight. As the only black woman allowed to work on those files, Johnson dealt with overt racism and sexism to which she paid no mind. She told the world “we need to be assertive and aggressive as women in those days and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be”.

Such bravery and tenacity boded well for Katherine Johnson. Her commitment fast-tracked her progress at NASA which in turn enabled her to work on the operations for Friendship 7- the first attempt made by NASA to orbit the Earth completed victoriously by John Glenn in February of 1962. Johnson’s ‘mathematical calculations of orbital mechanics’ were integral for its success. John Glenn showed favour for Katherine, asking to get ‘the girl with the numbers’ that ‘if she says the numbers are good, then I’m all ready to go’.

In November of 2015, Johnson was rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 for ‘exceptional leadership’ and ‘her calculations of the first flight calculation for John Glenn’s orbit and the 1969 Apollo 11’. She was the rightful recipient of such an honourable award, still, it’s a shame that only after so many years was her work finally recognized.

Mary Jackson was a mathematician and an aerospace engineer who in 1958, became the first African American female engineer to work at NASA. Born and raised in Virginia, and having graduated high school with the highest honours, Jackson earned a degree in maths and physical sciences at what now is Hampton University.

As was the case with most women like herself, Mary worked at NACA’s West Area Computing Unit after having to complete further classes at, what was at the time, a segregated university. To do so, Jackson had to get special permission from a court ruling, which permitted her to become an engineer at its completion.

Mary Jackson went on to ‘lead programs influencing the hiring and promotion of women in NASA’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. In her honour, NASA’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C., was named after her and her legacy of determination and overcoming barriers as a black woman in the field of STEM will forever live on.

Both of these women, including Dorothy Vaughan- NASA’s first African American manager- only received the recognition and accolades they deserved in Margot Lee Shetterley’s 2005 book- Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Woman Mathematicians who helped Win the Space Race. They received further praise in the 2016 movie ‘Hidden Figures’ with actors Janelle Monae, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer, an excellent watch.

The women of the West Area Computing Unit were the heroines of NACA- instrumental for the Space Race but dismissed as the hidden figures of history. Since then, we have had black women in space, but we mustn’t forget the barriers black women had to overcome, the barriers only they had to face.

(This article was originally published on Impact Nottingham by Feyintoluwa Ayanlaja on October 9, 2020)