![]() ![]() ![]() Her entry, titled “Ladies Rock Outer Space,” included photographs and descriptions of her creations. Weinstock created the set to compete in an ongoing contest on the Lego Ideas website, where it met with popular acclaim. Ride, the first American woman in space, and Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, stood on either side of a space shuttle orbiter. Mathematician Katherine Johnson was shown working at her desk. ![]() When posed on their small stages, each minifig evoked famous photographs of the actual women. In the end, her prototype set depicted five women, including fellow MIT engineer Margaret Hamilton, who developed the software for the Apollo lunar guidance system, and Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and an early proponent of the Hubble Space Telescope. She also used, a company that creates custom minifigures. Weinstock created the figures and their miniature stages using a technique called “kit bashing”: combining or altering existing pieces from many different Lego sets. Weinstock was particularly attuned to stories of women she thought were underappreciated, such as astronomers or engineers. Also in early 2016, months before Hidden Figures came out, Maia Weinstock, a science writer at MIT and Lego enthusiast, began designing a set of minifigures or “minifigs” depicting notable women of NASA. In April 2016, Nathalia Holt published Rise of the Rocket Girls, recounting the histories of the women working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from its earliest days. The time seemed right for celebrating NASA’s women. In the depths of the Great Depression, fans of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon could follow their favorite characters' exploits in comic strips, Sunday strips, comic books and film serials. Perhaps most significantly, the term “hidden figures” became shorthand for histories that had been forgotten (or previously ignored or dismissed), giving people a way to name those whose work had largely been overlooked. But the popular reception of the movie greatly increased awareness of their story. And NASA announced some months before the movie was released that a new building at Langley would be called the Katherine G. After all, President Barack Obama awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2015, before both the movie and the book came out. Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughn all made significant real-life contributions to the space program: Johnson calculated rocket trajectories and orbital paths, publishing her technical findings Jackson became NASA’s first Black female engineer and Vaughn, the first Black woman to be a supervisor at Langley, also helped program the first mechanical computers at the center. The award-winning movie took some liberties with historical accuracy, but it brought widespread recognition to the women’s remarkable careers. At Langley in Hampton, Virginia, those jobs were also racially segregated. Unlike fledgling male engineers, however, women computers did their work without the hope of professional advancement beyond their existing employment. They began their careers as human computers, a mathematical equivalent of the secretarial pool used in many research centers at the time. Author Margaret Weitekamp, curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, writes with warmth and personal experience to guide readers through extraordinary spaceflight history while highlighting objects from the Smithsonian's spaceflight collection. Spanning from the 1929 debut of the futuristic Buck Rogers to present-day privatization of spaceflight, Space Craze celebrates America's endless enthusiasm for space exploration. I cannot wait until January 13th.Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Spaceflight This book/movie increases the visibility of a historically unacknowledged group in STEM, the black woman, and bright minds who see it will never be the same. Thankfully, despite this lack of visible and acknowledged role models for black women entering STEM, we decide to persist. It is a shame because examples like this help to shape possibilities for children. It is a shame that I did not learn about Katherine Johnson and female computers until 2015. Knowing her story gives me a context for my own, and further proof that black women have a long, distinguished and under-appreciated history in STEM. I can only imagine the level of perseverance, self-control and resilience needed to excel during the Jim Crow era, let alone in a male-dominated technical field. As an African American woman in nuclear engineering, knowing of Katherine Johnson gives me a reference point. ![]() Johnson and others like her resonates loudly with me. All female computer pools at NASA were the lifeblood of the institution in those days, handling complex calculations that today's computers allow us to take for granted. ![]()
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