Hidden Figures

We had a very enjoyable family movie night watching this offering. Chronicling the years of NASA’s attempts to get man into space, and the exceptional maths required to be computed by hand, it also charts the issues of race relations at the time. Three remarkable African-American women’s lives are included:

• Katherine Johnson who calculated the flight and landing trajectories for various missions,
• Dorothy Vaughan, trying to be recognised as the supervisor she already is and to be paid for it, and
• Mary Jackson, fighting to be allowed to train as an engineer.

There are strong overtones of the tensions of being African-American at the time, and the challenges for women in the workforce. The story is uplifting as you watch each woman challenge societal norms and use their exceptional intelligence in the service of their country. The people who did the math were called computers, and you also see the beginnings of the takeover of technology as the first IBM is slowly built at NASA. Some of the women trained themselves to program the computer, and ensured their job security for longer. For anyone who likes technology, maths and space, this will really interest as well as open up discussion about how quickly things have changed.

As we watched Apollo 13 last year, everyone already had some understanding of the space element. All of us really enjoyed it, and it opened the kids’ eyes (age 10-14) a little more to some of the challenges and issues of the sixties.