“This is not a black role, this is not a female role,” he said to her. “This is a unique role that brings to life what we are marching for: equality.” The rest of Nichols’ weekend was a fog of anger and sadness: what right did Dr. King have to upend her career plans? Eventually, she moved from resignation to conviction. Nichols returned to Gene Roddenberry’s office on Monday morning and asked him to tear up the resignation letter.
How could Katherine not be a fan? Everything about space had fascinated her from the very beginning, and there, on television, was a black woman in space, doing her job and doing it well. A black person and a woman both, but also just Lieutenant Uhura, the most qualified person for the job. Katherine, in fact, thought science—and space—was the ideal place for talented people of any background. The results were what mattered, she told classrooms of students. Math was either right or wrong, and if you got it right, it didn’t matter what color you were.
Star Trek was set in 2266, but it wasn’t necessary to wait three centuries to see what America’s finest minds could do, given free rein. The Apollo mission was happening now. In the Hillside Inn, among the group of her sorority sisters. Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts’ place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn’t have traded places with the astronauts for all the gold in Fort Knox. All alone out there in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. Given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.
The Eagle, the lunar lander, issued forth from the Apollo command module at 4:00 p.m. The touchdown caused a collective shiver. The crew was close, so close. The world waited for the door of the crab-like mechanical contraption to open. It took four hours. Then, finally, at 10:38 p.m.: sighs, applause, exuberance, dumbstruck silence, from all corners of the Earth, as Neil Armstrong planted his foot on luna firma. The actual landing had been the one part of the mission that had been impossible to rehearse prior to the actual moment—and the most dangerous. The Apollo 11 astronauts had given the mission only a middling chance of success: though Neil Armstrong handicapped the odds of returning to Earth safely at 90 percent, he thought they had only a 50-50 chance of landing on the Moon on the first go. Katherine Johnson had confidence: she knew her numbers were right, and she assumed that everyone else—Marge Hannah and the fellas there in her office, Mary Jackson and Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams, everyone from the top of NASA to the bottom—had given their all to the mission.
Besides, Katherine always expected the best, even in the most difficult of situations. “You have to expect progress to be made,” she told herself and anyone else who might ask. It had taken more than a decade of data sheets and plotting, IBM punch cards and long days and nights in front of the Friden calculator, delays and tragedies and most of all numbers; at this point, there were more numbers than even she could count. All on top of the long and monotonous years spent learning the basics of the machine that had given birth to the space program.
The trajectories of so many people had influenced hers along the way: Dorothy Vaughan and the women of West Computing. Virginia Tucker and all the women who had helped revolutionize aeronautics, with their work and their dogged presence at the NACA. Dr. Claytor and his enthusiastic preparation. John W. Davis from West Virginia State. Even A. Philip Randolph and Charles Hamilton Houston. Of course, it couldn’t have happened without her parents. What she wouldn’t have given for her father to see her—to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America.
And epic it was. Katherine allowed the moment, with all its implications, to sink in. There were still challenges ahead. She watched the men in the dust of the Moon and thought of the orbiting command service module, out of view of the camera, circling the Moon every ninety minutes. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon would have a brief window to get back into the lunar lander and reconnect their dinghy with the mother ship above. After that, it would be three long days on the highway back to Earth, then through the fire of the atmosphere and into the terrestrial ocean below. Each leg carried the specter of the unknown; only after their landing matched the numbers of her equations, when they had been plucked from the ocean and cosseted in the waiting navy ship, would she be able to exhale.
But even then—only for a moment. Apollo still had six missions to go. And there was nothing like the thrill of the next thing. Katherine and Al Hamer had already started thinking about what it would take to plot a course to Mars; their colleagues Marge Hannah and John Young would look even farther into the cosmos, dreaming up a “grand tour” of the outer planets. It was built on the same idea as the rendezvous in the orbits of Earth and the Moon, where a spaceship doing a flyby of one planet used the planet’s gravity to slingshot it on ahead to the next. The nimble minds in 1244 were already hopping from Mars to Jupiter and on to Saturn, like stones skipped in a glassy lake. One day, perhaps, the rest of humanity would follow them. Then, Katherine Johnson would really discover what was out there. It would be simple, she thought, just like sending a man into orbit around Earth, just like putting a man on the Moon. One thing built on the next. Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.
EPILOGUE
It’s the question that comes up most often when I tell people about the black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA: Why haven’t I heard this story before? At this point, more than five years after I first began the research for what would become Hidden Figures, I’ve fielded the question more times than I can count. Most people are astonished that a history with such breadth and depth, involving so many women and linked directly to the twentieth century’s defining moments, has flown below the radar for so long. There’s something about this story that seems to resonate with people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and backgrounds. It’s a story of hope, that even among some of our country’s harshest realities—legalized segregation, racial discrimination—there is evidence of the triumph of meritocracy, that each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.