Hidden Figures
Back in
1961, when the USSR and the United States were in the middle of the Cold War,
the Space Race was a competition (if you want to call it that) to achieve
firsts in spaceflight capabilities. Both nations were trying to send rockets
into space, to put satellites, people in orbit around the earth and even with
the objective to put men in the moon. NASA was created 3 years before in 1958
and both countries needed the best minds available to do groundbreaking work
that had never been done before.
Some states
in the US still segregated black people in schools, work, health services, libraries,
bathrooms, transportation, among others. So, what were the odds that 3 black
women would be fundamental in the development of the Space Race at NASA? Actually,
pretty low, but that didn’t stop Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary
Jackson, who worked at the colored computer division at NASA, making calculations
for the Space Program. Hidden Figures is the movie, based on the story of
these three remarkable women, that stood out in a time were all circumstances
were against them.
As Ricky Gervais says “If you took every religious book there’s ever
been, and hid them or destroyed them… then you took every science book and
destroyed that, in a thousand years’ time, those science books would be back
exactly the same, because the tests would always turn out the same. Those
religious books would either never exist or they’d be totally different,
because there’s no test.1”
It took
lots of scientists, mathematicians and engineers to create all the components
and calculate trajectories needed for the US Space Program to succeed, so it’s
fair to think that at some point, some other person could have come to the same
conclusion as Katherine did, or solve the problems that Mary helped at
engineering or eventually programming the IBM 7090 as Dorothy’s team did.
But this
story is not about quitting. This is a story about persistence, about defying
what’s established and fight for your legitimate right. They were the first, in
a time when they were segregated by gender and race. And even when the movie
has some historical inaccuracies 2, in order to make the story more
friendly for a film, the movie turns out as both inspirational and entertaining.
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