But the urgency of the competition with the Soviets created pressure to adopt the quickest, surest way into space, even if it was a little crude, or sacrificed long-term spacefaring viability for short-term earthly victory. In the Flight Research Division, Katherine Goble spent her days with her mind and her data sheets full of the specifications of real planes—not plane parts, not model planes, not disembodied wings in wind tunnels but actual vehicles that hurtled humans through the atmosphere. Flight Research’s cousins, a “notoriously freethinking” group of engineers called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division—PARD—had developed an expertise in rocketry, setting up an adjunct operation on an isolated test range on Wallops Island off the Virginia coast. Their rockets had reached speeds of Mach 15 in flight, and they were confident of their abilities to lift a payload—a satellite and a human passenger—into orbit.
As the clamor for action in space grew louder, engineers from PARD and the Flight Research Division moved to center stage. The core of the group coalescing around the US space effort shared an office with Katherine, ate sandwiches with her during lunch, and bonded with her over an enthusiasm for gust alleviation and wake turbulence. Virtually every history of the space program would include their names—John Mayer, Carl Huss, Ted Skopinski, W. H. Phillips, Chris Kraft, and others.
Katherine Goble had stood behind the engineers’ numbers for the past three years, and as humans bounded beyond the sky she would continue to do so. Like many other Americans, Katherine bridled at the reality of the Russians’ metal moon orbiting overhead. We can’t let that pass without doing something about it, she thought. But beyond sating the national pride that had been pricked by the Soviet advance, the prospect of being involved in something that was so untried, untested, and unexplored connected with Katherine’s truest self. Getting the chance to figure out how to send humans into space was fortune beyond measure. As she worked with the engineers to build a course from the warmth and safety of their home to the cold void beyond, Katherine Goble’s talents would truly take flight.
Dorothy Vaughan watched the furor from a second-floor office in the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, Building 1251. The Unitary Plan Tunnel had come online in 1955, funded by legislation to build state-of-the-art wind tunnels at each of the NACA’s three main laboratories. The team that occupied most of the new building managed its own section of computers, like all the laboratory’s divisions now.
Physically, Dorothy and the West Computing office had never been closer to the high-speed future. As the laboratory embraced the onset of the space age, the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel would remain one of the busiest hubs of the center, testing “nearly every supersonic airplane, missile, and spacecraft” that saw the light of day over the next two decades. But in terms of the center’s computing operations, Dorothy’s pool now existed on the periphery. By 1956, more black women were now working in other areas of the laboratory than in West Computing itself. After more than a decade in their two-room spread in the Aircraft Loads Laboratory, Dorothy and the remaining women had been downsized to the new office in 1251. Miriam Mann, Ophelia Taylor, Chubby Peddrew, and many others from West Computing’s class of 1943 had, like Katherine Goble and Mary Jackson, been offered permanent positions with engineering groups. Dorothy Vaughan was more likely to run into her former colleagues in the Langley cafeteria or the parking lot than to see them during the workday.
Dorothy had glimpsed the shadows of her own future when Langley disbanded the East Computing pool in 1947. Each new facility the laboratory built fueled the demand for specialization among its professionals. As the answers to the fundamental problems of flight became clearer, the next level of questioning required finer, more acute knowledge, making the idea of a central computing pool—generalists with mechanical calculating machines, capable of handling any type of overflow work—redundant. If anything, the NACA’s response to Sputnik would only intensify the process of change, as the herculean task of safely navigating the heavens was divided into myriad smaller tasks, tests, parts, and people. Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well. Without it, women remaining in the segregated pool were left in a state of technical limbo.
Getting hired by the laboratory as a professional mathematician had been an important and groundbreaking stride for the black women—for all of Langley’s women, of course. Their employment represented an expansion of the very idea of who had the right to enlist in the country’s scientific workforce. From the beginning of the computing pools, the women easily hurdled the engineers’ expectations, raising the bar as they did it. As the days of World War II receded into memory, so did the expectation that riveters and gas station attendants and munitions experts and, yes, even mathematicians would, or even should, be female. And yet, away from public view, one of the largest concentrations of professional female mathematicians in the United States stayed on the job, their identities wedded to their professions.
The defense machine’s hunger virtually assured them of a job through retirement. Advancement, however, would require a different plan of attack. It was a concept easily grasped, empirically proven, but far from simple to execute: if a woman wanted to get promoted, she had to leave the computing pool and attach herself to the elbow of an engineer, figure out how to sit at the controls of a wind tunnel, fight for the credit on a research report. To move up, she had to get as close as she could to the room where the ideas were being created.
With East Area Computing gone, West Area Computing was boxed in on two fronts. Not only was the group all black, it was also the only stand-alone all-female professional section left at the laboratory, and by the late 1950s, that had become an anachronism. The black men, like Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams and Larry Brown, certainly had to spar with racial prejudice, but they started their Langley careers with all the privileges of being a male engineer. And although the lacunae of computing pools attached to PARD and Flight Research and the plethora of tunnels were also staffed and supervised by women, those women, including the newly integrated black computers, reported directly to researchers, and they were closely tethered to the work and the status of the male engineers whose spaces they shared. Like Virginia Tucker before her, Dorothy Vaughan now presided over an appendix, still attached to the research operation but whose function had attenuated over time.
Dismantling East Computing had been a simple matter of operations, of supply and demand and expedience. When that pool’s numbers grew too small to warrant maintaining a section, the laboratory simply distributed the stragglers into other sections and passed their outstanding assignments along to West Computing. But as long as “West Computer” was still the unspoken code for “Colored Computer,” the decision to draw the curtain on Dorothy’s group would require more nuanced consideration.