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    Hidden Figures calculated the path to the Moon while segregated


    The book Hidden Figures mentions around 80 Black women mathematicians worked at NACA/NASA from the 1940s–1970s, though not all names are widely documented.

    by ThatAvidPandaBear

    View 31 Comments

    31 Comments

    1. ThatAvidPandaBear on

      Katherine Johnson (trajectory calculations)
      Dorothy Vaughan (West Area Computing leader)
      Mary Jackson (aerospace engineer)
      Christine Darden (aeronautical engineer
      Melba Roy Mouton (Echo project)
      Annie Easley (Worked on Centaur rocket software)
      Miriam Mann, Kathryn Peddrew, and many others in the West Area Computing group.

    3. AbaconflavouredD on

      Wild how they mapped the stars while America couldn’t even map basic human decency.

    4. tr00th on

      Makes me wonder how many hidden figures are responsible for this current mission.

    7. QuantumLyricist on

      And then they said there were no computers to do the calculations for the Apollo missions, which is laughably wrong. The spacecraft itself had computers, although primitive by today’s standards, and there were computers on earth to make calculations too!!!

    8. JustGoodSense on

      The women who did the calculations by hand were literally called “computers.”

    9. SplendidPunkinButter on

      If you read the book instead of just watching the movie, black women were also integral in figuring out how to break the sound barrier

    11. MundaneWiley on

      Uhh those images not even from anything having to do with the moon landings. Just picture of some people doing calculations, don’t think the intent there was to exclude anybody. We can’t be offended by everrryyythiiing

    14. sillyadam94 on

      This has to be deliberate, right? The Hidden Figures are huge fucking icons at this point.

    15. Oceanman72 on

      There definitely were computers!! They just weren’t electronic, they were brilliant people

    16. Trust_me_I_am_doctor on

      The amount of yakubians who think this story was made up for some DEI monthly magazine fan fiction is appalling.

    18. Sleepy10105s on

      Trying to make something racist where there was not hint of racism…nice.

      Yea they didn’t picture the thousands of people that made it possible and only posted two relatively famous pictures.

    21. UnhelpfulBread on

      Literally forgetting the term “computer” was originally a term for a *persons* job… usually a woman but definitely women of color too.

    23. stumblewiggins on

      The astronauts even preferred the human calculators when the machines were first being used. They wanted the people to check all of the machine computations because they didn’t trust them yet. 

    24. loverboypiazza on

      How the hell are people getting mad at this?? It’s very obvious they’re talking about mechanical computers, not people whose title is Computer. Waking up with some fresh bs for people to get riled up at

    25. adamvanderb on

      History books really have a way of leaving out the most important people in the room

    26. zoosha2curtaincall on

      I remember seeing the movie and being really annoyed at the tacked-on scene where John Glenn refuses to go on the spacecraft for the first U.S. manned launch until the Black women computers verified the numbers put out by the brand-new electronic computer. It was so obviously written for the movie and way too on-the-nose.

      Then I looked it up afterwards and it 100% actually happened.

    31. Cheezeball25 on

      Not only were there human computers doing the math, real computers were also used extensively alongside them. Heck, one of the first examples of a computer based on silicon integrated circuits was used as the navigation computer for the Apollo module. There’s a lot of cool stuff that went into these things back then.

      [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer)

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