The tragic end of Apollo 1 shook NASA to its core. The astronauts weren’t hundreds of thousands of miles away when the accident happened; they were on the ground, within feet of the ground crew and the engineers, and yet they still died. The road to the stars was a rough one, and the Apollo team needed no reminder of the risk. They redesigned the spacecraft, fixing flaws that had been exposed by the disaster and redoubling their focus on every possible detail of the next nine missions, each a step in the stairway to the Moon. The ascent to the Moon landing was predicated on the belief that each cell in the body of the space program was both individually superb and seamlessly connected to the cells around it.
Two vehicles and 238,900 miles: three days there and three days back. Twenty-one hours on the surface of the Moon for two astronauts in the lunar lander, while the service module circled the heavenly body in a parking orbit. Katherine knew better than anyone that if the trajectory of the parked service module was even slightly off, when the astronauts ended their lunar exploration and piloted their space buggy back up from the Moon’s surface, the two vehicles might not meet up. The command service module was the astronauts’ bus—their only bus—back to Earth: the lander would ferry the astronauts to the waiting service module and then be discarded. If the two vehicles’ orbits didn’t coincide, the two in the lander would be stranded forever in the vacuum of space.
The leadership of the Space Task Group set a risk standard of “three nines”—0.999, a criterion requiring that every aspect of the program be projected to a 99.9 percent success rate, or one failure for every thousand incidences. The astronauts, former test pilots and combat veterans accustomed to riding with the shadow of death on every flight, put themselves in NASA’s hands. They were prepared to give their lives to the mission, just as they had been prepared to give their lives as pilots, but they would just as soon trust that the brain busters had done their math and that by the rule of three nines, their unprecedented flight to the Moon would be less risky in fact than a Sunday drive in their Corvettes.
Katherine Johnson, for her part, was determined to make this happen. She arrived at the office early, went home in the late afternoon to check on her girls, and then came back in the evening, maintaining a schedule of fourteen-or sixteen-hour days. She and engineer Al Hamer collaborated on four reports between 1963 and 1969, some of them written to work out the all-important lunar orbits, others asking the question, What if? What if the computers went out? What if there was an electrical failure on board the spacecraft and the astronauts needed to navigate back home by the stars, like the mariners of a simpler age? As the years of the 1960s slipped by, it seemed that Katherine was increasingly at the office late at night, the hours passing like minutes as she and Hamer refined calculations and made rough drafts of diagrams for their reports.
One morning on the way to work, Katherine literally fell asleep at the wheel, waking up shaken but unhurt by the side of the road. She was so absorbed with the problem of keeping the astronauts safe on their round trip to the Moon that she was making herself vulnerable to the most mundane kind of risk. She had to keep pushing, however. Each year, NASA made progress toward converting the theoretical concepts of how to reach the Moon into operating practice. Each mission closed the distance, brought the fruit closer to their grasp. But this last step, with its complicated dance between the Moon and the lander and the waiting command module, was the most complicated. Katherine Johnson had given her best to her part of the grand puzzle, of that she was sure. The day was soon coming when the world would see if her best, if the brainy fellas’ best, if NASA’s best, was good enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
To Boldly Go
In July 1969, a hundred or so black women crowded into a room, their attention commanded by the sounds and grainy images issuing forth from a small black-and-white television. The flickering light of the TV illuminated the women’s faces, the history of their country written in the great diversity of their features and hair and skin color, which ranged from near-ivory to almost-ebony, hues of beige and coffee and cocoa and topaz filling in between. Some of the women were approaching their golden years, the passage of time and experience etched in their faces and bearing. Others were in the full bloom of youth, their eyes like diamonds, reflecting a bright future. They convened around the shared purpose of the advancement of women like them, and to use their collective talents for the betterment of their community. From up and down the East Coast, and even farther afield, they had come together for the weekend, though the time they shared in each other’s company would forge lifetime friendships.
Their presence at the conclave tipped them as members of the top echelon of the race, though in fact many of them were the daughters and granddaughters of the janitresses and washerwomen and domestic servants whose backbreaking work had funded thousands of college educations and bankrolled down payments on homes, who supported America’s great economic pyramid even as it pinned them in place with its weight. They, the legacy of those women, had spent their lives in varying degrees of distance from their country’s great pageant, standing on the side of the stage, even though there was virtually no aspect of their lives that had not been touched by those big sweeps, no part of the grand story that did not include them in some way.
Throughout the day, as the women conducted their meeting, their interest in the marathon drama unfolding on the television had waxed and waned, groups of them perching in front of the screen to get the latest updates before heading off to focus on the day’s agenda. But as the day grew long, more of them were drawn in, gazing into the television—into the void of space, into their own hearts, trying to make some meaning of what they were watching. The women who watched joined with their fellow Americans in a moment of consonance, the roulette of emotions in the room—pride, elation, impatience, awe, resentment, patriotism, suspense, fear—replayed in differing mixtures in living rooms and meeting places around the United States. In fact, the unprecedented episode they witnessed on that Saturday night they shared with a total of six hundred million people around the world: all standing in front of the same window, all observing the same thing at the same time.
Out of that global audience, four hundred thousand NASA employees, contractors, and military support watched with particular interest, seeing in the craft that approached the Moon the measure of a screw, the blueprint of a hatch, the filament in a circuit, the fulfillment of a promise made by a president who hadn’t lived to see it carried out. They dotted the globe, those who had worked on Project Apollo, those who had made possible the day that had come. They clustered around displays and switchboards and dials and computers, monitoring every heartbeat of the spacecraft that had slipped out of the influence of its home planet and was now being enticed by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Most of them joined their friends and families in gathering around the televisions as well.