This film tells a true story: Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan. These three names have not remained associated in the collective imagination with the American space race. And yet…
Theodore Melfi’s film pays them a more than well-deserved tribute, deploying all the expertise of American cinema, falling into clichés, and aiming to create a spectacle effect, even if that means trivializing a beautiful story to make it popular.
It is the story of these extremely intelligent, courageous, and determined women that gives flavor to this edifying film, where the fight for civil rights intertwines with the technological epic to show how prejudices gradually fall away.
These three names have become prominent over the decades in the universe of NASA. Women in a man’s world, Black in a world of whites, Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy played a significant role in the race between the USSR and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s to send men into orbit around the Earth.
Assigned to a computing department exclusively composed of people of color, relegated to a separate building, and underpaid, these brilliant scientists at the Langley Research Center were still confronted by the segregationist laws of Virginia at the time.
Katherine Johnson had to endure many humiliations before being recognized for her true worth, gaining the trust of her superiors, and establishing herself over the years. A mathematician and physicist specializing in space navigation, she participated in the Mercury and Apollo missions (to the Moon) and various space shuttle programs. In 2015, at 98 years old, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.
Mary Jackson became the first female aeronautics engineer in the United States after having to fight in court to attend evening classes at a school reserved for white people.
A bit older, Dorothy Vaughan, who had honed her skills to master the emerging language of computing—Fortran, which would play an essential role in the speed of calculations—became the first female manager at NASA.
