While NASA appeared to be dithering on the ground, Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov followed Yuri Gagarin’s April 1961 triumph with a successful seventeen-orbit flight, nearly a full day in space, on October 6, 1961. American government officials, the press, and the public expressed their disappointment with the delays, many impugning the agency’s judgment and competence. Even when the technical issues were in hand, the launch team had to contend with the weather. A long stretch of low, overcast skies at Cape Canaveral put the kibosh on two more scheduled launches, on January 20 and February 12, 1962. Finally, the Space Task Group affixed February 20, 1962, as John Glenn’s debut.
The incessant delays and high stakes would have caused most individuals to lose their focus, but John Glenn gave even-tempered, optimistic interviews to the impatient press and busied himself by keeping his mind and body in peak condition. Three days prior to the most significant date of his life, Glenn went through a final simulation, carrying out a full checkout of his flight plan. Before commending himself to his destiny, however, the astronaut implored the engineers to execute one more check: a review of the orbital trajectory that had been generated by the IBM 7090 computer.
Many of the operational aspects of John Glenn’s upcoming flight had been refined by testing during the years following Sputnik, and the knowledge and experience gleaned during the early days were consolidated during the execution of the suborbital flights. The recovery team confidently manned their stations around the globe, ready to haul the astronaut and his capsule out of the water. NASA put considerable effort into building redundancies and fail-safes into the network of IBM computers and the eighteen-station Mercury tracking network.
The astronauts, by background and by nature, resisted the computers and their ghostly intellects. In a test flight, a pilot staked his reputation and his life on his ability to exercise total, direct, and constant control over the plane. A tiny error in judgment or a speck of delay in deciding on a course of action might mean the difference between safety and calamity. In a plane, at least, it was the pilot’s call; the “fly-by-wire” setup of the Mercury missions, where the craft and its controls were tethered via radio communication to the whirring electronic computers on the ground, pushed the hands-on astronauts out of their comfort zone. Every engineer and mathematician had a story of double-checking the machines’ data only to find errors. What if the computer lost power or seized up and stopped working during the flight? That too was something that happened often enough to give the entire team pause.
The human computers crunching all of those numbers—now that the astronauts understood. The women mathematicians dominated their mechanical calculators the same way the test pilots dominated their mechanical planes. The numbers went into the machines one at a time, came out one at a time, and were stored on a piece of paper for anyone to see. Most importantly, the figures flowed in and out of the mind of a real person, someone who could be reasoned with, questioned, challenged, looked in the eye if necessary. The process of arriving at a final result was tried and true, and completely transparent.
Spaceship-flying computers might be the future, but it didn’t mean John Glenn had to trust them. He did, however, trust the brainy fellas who controlled the computers. And the brainy fellas who controlled the computers trusted their computer, Katherine Johnson. It was as simple as eighth-grade math: by the transitive property of equality, therefore, John Glenn trusted Katherine Johnson. The message got through to John Mayer or Ted Skopinski, who relayed it to Al Hamer or Alton Mayo, who delivered it to the person it was intended for.
“Get the girl to check the numbers,” said the astronaut. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I’m ready to go.
The space age and television were coming into their own at the same time. NASA was acutely aware that the task before them wasn’t only about making history but also about making a myth, adding a gripping new chapter to the American narrative that worshipped hard work, ingenuity, and the triumph of democracy. At the Cape, a behind-the-scenes camera captured extensive footage of the astronaut as he walked through each station of the trip he had already taken hundreds of times in NASA simulators, fodder for a documentary to be released later in the year. The agency sent a film crew to each of the remote tracking stations, recording the communications teams as they completed their preflight checkouts. And the footage that showed the second-by-second drama in Mission Control—white guys in white shirts and skinny black ties wearing headphones, facing forward at long desks outfitted with communications consoles, mesmerized by the enormous electronic map of the world on the wall in front of them—created the enduring image of the engineer at work.
Meanwhile, away from the front lines, out of sight of the cameras, the black employees, whose numbers had been growing at Langley and all the NASA centers since the end of World War II, busily calculated numbers, ran simulations, wrote reports, and dreamed of space travel alongside their white counterparts, as curious as any other brain buster about what humanity might find once it had ventured far from its spherical island, and just as doggedly pushing for answers to their inquiries. At the Lewis Research Center in Ohio, a black scientist named Dudley McConnell was among the researchers working on aerodynamic heating, one of the most serious challenges facing the astronauts as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere and plummeted toward the ocean. Annie Easley, who had joined the Lewis Laboratory in 1955, was staffed on Project Centaur, developing a rocket stage that was ultimately used in the Atlas. At the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which was charged with the operation of the two IBM 7090s that would track the spaceship and relay information to Mission Control, a Howard University graduate named Melba Roy oversaw a section of programmers working on trajectories.
Also at Goddard was Dorothy Hoover, embarking on the third (or fourth, or maybe fifth) act of her career. Following her graduate work at the University of Michigan, Hoover had worked at the Weather Bureau for three years. Perhaps nostalgic for the agency that had boosted her mathematical career, she transferred to Goddard in 1959, the only one of the centers that had been created organically out of NASA. Her career advance had continued; she now held a senior ranking of GS-13. While her colleagues at Langley put their minds to work on the engineering project of the century, Dorothy Hoover folded herself back into the theoretical work she loved, continuing her publication record with a coauthored book on computational physics.
It was at Langley where the progress of the last two decades was most evident. At the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel, Thomas Byrdsong got a head start on the long road to the Moon by testing a model of the Saturn rocket, a launch vehicle the size of a redwood tree. Engineer Jim Williams, still on the team with John D. “Jaybird” Bird, was already helping to work toward President Kennedy’s pledge of a Moon landing. The division would be associated with lunar orbit rendezvous, one of the most ingenious and elegant solutions to the challenge of propelling extraordinarily heavy objects on the several-hundred-thousand-mile journey to the Moon and back.