But perhaps most important, Katherine Johnson’s story can be a doorway to the stories of all the other women, black and white, whose contributions have been overlooked. By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs. I think Katherine would appreciate that.
For Mary Jackson, who remained steadfast in her pursuit of the ideals of the Double V—for African Americans and for women—the years following the Moon landing would be a time of change and choice. “Rockets, moon shots, spend it on the have-nots,” Marvin Gaye sang in his 1971 anthem “Inner City Blues,” addressing the quagmire that was Vietnam, an economy beset by inflation, and most of all, the isolation, anger, and economic despair of blacks living in Detroit, Washington, DC, Watts, and Baltimore. In the 1960s, it had felt possible that the idealism of Camelot, the Great Society, and the civil rights movement, those inheritors of the Double V, might finally wash away the poverty and injustice that had plagued America since its founding. As the decade drew to a close, it became apparent that the dream of Dr. King that had rung out over the Lincoln Memorial was actually the explosive dream deferred of Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” . . . In Newsome Park, there was dwindling evidence of the hopefulness that Eric Epps had displayed when he dedicated the development’s community center in 1945. The spaceflight revolution had solidified Katherine Johnson’s and Dorothy Vaughan’s positions in the middle class, but the neighborhood they and Eunice Smith and many others left behind was more and more like a poor island, cut off from the jobs and schools that would help them make the same leap the West Computers had made.
And that was before getting to “pollution, ecological damage, energy shortages, and the arms race,” the gremlins of the century’s technological revolution. Instead of creating unifying hope, an expansive space program was “salt on the wounds of the country’s more Earthbound concerns,” wrote NASA historian Robert Ferguson. As early as 1966, President Johnson, the space program’s biggest political champion, began looking at NASA as a “big fat money pot” that he could drain to ease a budget strapped by social programs and Vietnam. With the Moon landing achieved, the victory over the Soviet Union in hand, there was no urgency to push beyond Project Apollo, whose last two missions narrowly escaped cancellation.
The press surrounding the end of the Apollo program was clamorous, but the cancellation of another program also garnered headlines. In 1972, the United States decided to cancel its supersonic transport program, the SST, which many aerodynamicists had hoped would give them an “Apollo moment,” a glorious, high-profile display of their technology. The expensive program raised the hackles of those concerned about its negative impact on the Earth’s ozone layer, but it was the sonic boom “carpet” that swept across the landscape as the plane passed overhead that really inflamed public opinion. Reports claimed that shock waves from the high-speed commercial planes were “frightening residents, breaking windows, cracking plaster, and setting dogs to barking.” Some purported that the invisible menace had even caused the “death of pets and the insanity of livestock.” Local authorities received complaints of broken windows and traumatized animals, and calls to police surged as citizens reported unidentified blasts that came literally out of the clear blue sky.
The supersonic and hypersonic transport machines dreamed up in the 1950s and 1960s would have to wait, although in the 1970s Langley did turn much of its focus back to NASA’s first A: aeronautics. “In 1969 alone, there were 57 certified American airlines, which carried approximately 164 million originating passengers and some 20 billion revenue ton-miles of freight,” NASA revealed in a 1971 publication. The aerodynamicists’ priorities for the new decade were less glamorous, but a necessary part of solving the problems that were the result of an increasingly mobile society. One of the problems that the center focused on was noise abatement: busy skies were often noisy skies, even without sonic booms. Another issue was efficiency. With increasing fuel prices, the aircraft industry shifted its priority from increasing speed and power to boosting efficiency in subsonic or low supersonic flight.
Langley announced a sweeping reorganization in 1970, decreasing its workforce to a total of 3,853 from its peak of 4,485 employees in 1965. For those who lived through the reorganization, announced in the form of a forty-seven-page avocado-green book that landed on employees’ desks at the end of September that year, it was in many ways a more jarring time than the period of transition from the NACA to NASA. Waves of RIFs and RIGs—Reductions in Force and Reductions in Grade—happened so frequently at Langley in the 1970s that they spawned a new verb, as in “John got riffed last week.” Those who did survive the RIFs felt a sense of betrayal at NASA’s significantly reduced ambitions. Not only were the brain busters not heading to Mars and the outer planets, but by December 1972, they had left their final footprints on the Moon. The summit of humanity’s knowledge crashed into low-orbit reality. The NASA of the 1970s was interested in “routine, quick-reaction and economical access to space.” The agency would never return to the glory of the Apollo years. But despite the downsizing of everything—budgets, workforce, expectations—the will to explore the world beyond Earth’s atmosphere did not, would not, could not go away.
Mary Jackson managed to surf Langley’s turmoil even as the sections, branches, and divisions around her recombined with greater frequency, the work groups at the bottom of the organization chart transforming like shards in a great NASA kaleidoscope. The names changed—Compressibility, Aero-Thermo, Applied Theory, Large Supersonic Tunnels, Transonic Aerodynamics, High-Speed Aircraft, Subsonic-Transonic—but her partnership with Kazimierz Czarnecki remained a constant. She stayed focused on the research she had pursued since becoming an engineer in 1958: the investigation of the impact of roughness (such as rivets or grooves) on the surface of a moving object on the boundary layer, that thin layer of air that passes most closely over a moving object. Never one to miss an opportunity to continue her education, Mary took FORTRAN classes, teaching herself to program. The computers that had made long-distance spaceflight possible were also revolutionizing aeronautical research, a specialty known as computational fluid dynamics. The engineers now conducted experiments in their beloved wind tunnels and then compared the results with simulations on their computers. Just as the electronic machines had taken the place of human computers in aeronautical research, the day would eventually come when the computer would displace the wind tunnel itself.