Though many competitors within the US government were vying to lead the space effort—among them the US Air Force, the US Naval Research Observatory in Washington, DC, and Wernher von Braun and the Germans who ran the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama—it was the NACA that was chosen as the repository for all of America’s disparate space operations. The NACA—civilian and innocuous, abundant in engineering talent—was the perfect container. In October 1958, with Mother Langley as the nucleus, the US government fused all the competing operations, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into the NACA. The expanded mission called for a new name: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.
The NACA was quiet, obscure, and largely overlooked. NASA would be high-profile, high-stakes, and scrutinized by the world. The work done by the NACA nuts was hidden behind the more public operations of the military services and commercial aircraft manufacturers. NASA was chartered “to provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities,” with all failures and tragedies of the endeavor laid bare to the citizenry and broadcast through the influential young medium of television. With the world watching, the new organization carrying the American banner into space would have to be “clean, technically perfect, and meritocratic, the bearer of a myth.”
The transition from the NACA to NASA didn’t change Langley’s facilities significantly, nor did it require drastic changes in the laboratory’s staff. But the shift in attitude and in public responsibility at the laboratory were as distinct in character as the golden age of aeronautics of the 1950s would be from the space-age 1960s. The quirky place where upstart engineers competed to “bootleg” their own projects with the knowing wink of their supervisors, where a central laboratory had grown organically into a culturally cohesive organization of five thousand had, from October 1957 to October 1958, become a high-profile bureaucracy with ten research centers and ten thousand employees.
As the Space Act of 1958 made its way through Congress, trailing behind it the sheaves of legal documents and memoranda required to bring NASA to life, one memo quietly circulated at what was soon to be renamed the Langley Research Center, authored by Langley’s assistant director, Floyd Thompson, dated May 5, 1958, officially ending segregation at Langley.
“Effective this date, the West Area Computers Unit is dissolved.”
As the clock ticked down on the NACA, only nine West Computers remained in the pool: Dorothy Vaughan, Marjorie Peddrew, Isabelle Mann, Lorraine Satchell, Arminta Cooke, Hester Lovely, Daisy Alston, Christine Richie, Pearl Bassette, and Eunice Smith. With one terse line of text, NASA crossed a frontier that had not been breached by its predecessor. The memo heralded the end of an era, the swan song of the Band of Sisters. The story of West Area Computing—how Dorothy Vaughan and her colleagues found their way to Langley, the tragedy and hope of World War II, the tyranny of the signs in the Langley cafeteria and on the bathroom doors, the women’s contributions to one of the most transformative technologies in the history of humankind—would get passed along as family lore, but leave barely a fingerprint in the histories of the black men and women who fought for progress in their communities, of the women who pushed for equality for their gender in all aspects of American life, or of the engineers and mathematicians who taught humans to fly. For the rest of their lives, the former West Computers reminisced with one another and with the East Computers and the engineers they worked with. They told tales at the retirement parties that crowded their calendars in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, but with the modesty characteristic of women of their generation, they were reluctant to describe their achievements as anything more than “just doing their jobs.”
The end of the West Area Computing section was a bittersweet moment for Dorothy Vaughan. It had taken her eight years to reach the seat at the front of the office. For seven years after that she ruled the most unlikely of realms: a room full of black female mathematicians, doing research at the world’s most prestigious aeronautical laboratory. Her stewardship of the section had supported the careers of women like Katherine Goble, who would ultimately receive her country’s highest recognition for her contributions to the space program. The standards upheld by the women of West Computing set a floor for the possibilities of a new generation of girls with a passion for math and hopes for a career beyond teaching. Just as the original NACA-ites would forever hold on to their identities as members of that venerable organization, the black women would always feel an allegiance to West Area Computing, and to the woman who led it to its final day, Dorothy Vaughan.
Dorothy was forty-eight years old in October 1958, with more than a decade of work still stretching out before her. Her older children, so tiny when she had first come to Hampton Roads, were now entering college. The younger boys were adolescents following fast in the path of their older siblings. Her work at Langley had enabled her to make good on her promise to her children and their futures. With their educations on track and a house of her own in her name—the Vaughans also left Newsome Park, in 1962—there was nothing stopping Dorothy from making the final years of her career about her own ambitions.
“She was the smartest of all the girls,” Katherine Goble would say of her colleague, years into her own retirement. “Dot Vaughan had brains coming out of her ears” (and Katherine Goble knew from brains). Dorothy was proud of the way she had navigated through the days of racial segregation, proud of whatever small share she might claim in contributing to the demise of that backward practice. She had watched the women of West Computing, along with the others at the laboratory, take flight within the NACA’s research operations; together, they proved that given opportunity and support, a female mind was the analytical equal of its male counterpart. But despite knowing for many years that this day would eventually come, and having done everything within her power to bring it about, the victory she savored as the memo circulated was tempered with disappointment. Progress for the group meant a step back for its leader; Dorothy’s career as a manager came to an end on the last day of the West Area Computing office.
Dorothy had never been one to linger over the past; the decade waiting in the wings promised to be one of the most interesting ever witnessed at the laboratory. For better or worse, Langley’s fresh start was giving Dorothy Vaughan a fresh start as well. She would now begin life at the new agency as she had started her career at the NACA: as just one of the girls.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Outer Space
This is not science fiction,” wrote President Eisenhower, in the preface to a fifteen-page document entitled Introduction to Outer Space. Prepared by the President’s Advisory Committee on Science in March 1958 as a primer on spaceflight, the brochure laid out the scientific principles of travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in terms a layperson could understand. “As everyone knows, it is more difficult to accelerate an automobile than a baby carriage,” read one passage. It also made the case for why a space program—and its enormous price tag—was in the interest of every American, offering four arguments for the public’s consideration. National defense and global prestige, of course, were the two concerns that had moved the reverie of space travel from the purview of novelists and eccentrics to the country’s number-one priority. The only thing that rivaled Americans’ fear of the Soviet Union’s incipient prowess in the heavens was their wounded national pride.