what’s cooler than space? i don’t know—probably nothing. but a close second would be all the people who have worked on bringing humanity closer to the stars and planets and today we honor the widely unknown contributions of a large group of american Black women who worked w NASA to develop the space program from the bottom up”
"Dozens of African American women worked for NASA as expert mathematicians from the 1940s to the 1960s and almost no one knows about it. Segregated within NASA facilities in Hampton, Va., well-educated Black women used slide rules and pencils to do the calculations for flights by astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepherd. […] These were women calculating the trajectories for America’s first manned space flights—segregated in a building with few amenities at a research center built on the site of the former Chesterville plantation."
there is very little remembered about these “hidden human computers,” but researches Lucy Short, and Duchess Harris (whose grandmother was one of these forgotten Black contributors to the space program), are beginning to research this all but forgotten history in hopes of revealing the fundamental role Black women played in launching mankind into orbit.
happy black history month!
