StarTalk Radio - Hidden Figures, with Margot Lee Shetterly and Janelle Monáe

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

Discover more about NASA’s “Hidden Figures” as Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with author Margot Lee Shetterly, Janelle Monáe, comic co-host Sasheer Zamata, NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry, NASA systems engineer Tracy Drain, and Bill Nye the Science Guy.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/hidden-figures-with-margot-lee-shetterly-and-janelle-monae/Photo Credit: Brandon Royal Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're going to explore the story of NASA's hidden figures. These are the unsung mathematicians whose calculations helped put the first Americans into space. So let's do this. So let's do this.

So my comedic co-host tonight is comedian Sasheer Zameda. Sasheer, welcome. Thank you. And on the subject of tonight, I have some knowledge of NASA's history. I wouldn't call myself an expert. We brought in an expert. We brought in Chief Historian of NASA, Bill Barry. Bill, thanks for joining us on Star Talk. Thank you.

So, to begin this conversation, first, I have the trailer for the film, Hidden Figures, just to get a basic idea of what that film is about. Check it out. We go from being our father's daughters to our husbands' wives to our baby's mothers. You know what we're doing here?

Trying to put a man into space. There's no protocol for women attending. There's no protocol for a man circling the earth either, sir. I plan on being an engineer at NASA. No matter what it takes. We all get there together or we don't get there at all. My gals are ready. So, Bill, you're the chief historian for NASA, and you advise on this film.

I did. So, I got to ask, did Hollywood get it right? Oh, definitely. Ted Melfi, the director of the movie, he was a fanatic about trying to get as much of the history as exactly correct as he could. Because you always got to give him a little latitude to, you know, because it's Hollywood, but you want the basics to at least be correct. Yeah, the big thing that happens in most movies, because, you know, it's not a documentary, it's a Hollywood movie. And the big issue is usually time compression, And that's what they did in this one as well. The movie takes place in 1961, 62. But...

Because John Glenn's launch. So Yuri Gagarin was 61, John Glenn was 62 in response. Yeah. But what the movie covers is things that happened from the mid-40s to about the mid-1960s. So there's some compression of things that happen there, so it's for dramatic effect. But, you know, I'm very happy with the work they did, and I'm really glad the movie's in the can now because now I don't have to answer all of Ted's questions on an hourly basis.

How long was that process? Like, when did you get involved with the movie? Early in 2016. they filmed in the spring of 2016 in Atlanta. So from about February through March or April, we were on the hook, me and many of my colleagues at NASA, answering amazing numbers of questions, finding pictures of things that they wanted pictures of. Okay, so they had to care about this enough to even make your job worthwhile. Because they could have just ignored everything,

and then it would have just been a piece of fluff. Yeah, we had some disagreements about some things. Ted said, this is a movie, and I know how to make a movie. And he was clearly right about that. And so we disagreed on a couple of things where I said, yeah, that wouldn't really happen. The wind tunnel scene is the key one. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, that's. She gets her heels stuck in the seconds before they turn on the wind tunnel. Yeah. And I told Ted, you know, Ted, people don't walk to their job through a wind tunnel. Anybody who works at NASA knows you don't walk through a wind tunnel. He goes, well, OK, so Bill, how many people in America know about this? How many people work at NASA? About 18,000.

He goes, okay, so 18,000 people will go, that's not a good thing. He said, I guarantee you all the millions of other people who watch the movie are going to think this is a great scene. 18,000 is nothing compared to millions of viewers. I wouldn't have known. He was right. compared to millions of viewers. He was right. Well, so actually,

so this film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly by the same title, Hidden Figures. And she actually stopped by my office recently. And I asked her for some backstory on these female mathematicians and how they got into the aeronautics industry. So let's check out the clip. So during World War II,

and we always hear about Rosie the Riveter and the women going into factories. Redefining women. Redefining women's work. Well, this is the same thing that happened with the mathematicians. I didn't know this. All of a sudden, there was a huge demand for aircraft research and development. In the 1940s, research and development? You know, in the 1940s, America's at war, you know, allied versus the Axis powers, supremacy of the sky. And who is going to do the hard work of the mathematical calculations necessary to make the planes faster, safer, more efficient? Plus, it's the boys who are flying the plane. It is. It was the boys.

You have an intellectual gap. If some of them would have been the guys, and now all the guys are at war, now you have women. Or even the engineers who were doing this work who were also called off to war. Right. And all of a sudden, it's like, wow, well, maybe we can give these women a chance. Maybe they can do this work. Maybe there are some smart women out there. Maybe there are some smart women. Probably not, but let's give it a chance.

Let's give it a chance. What do we have to lose? And then all of a sudden these former school teachers come in and became computers, mathematicians, and junior engineers. But it turned out they were really good at it. They proved themselves pretty quickly. And when it was obvious that not only could they do the work, they could also be hired at lower annual salaries than men. Well, that made a whole lot of sense. And then all of a sudden, 1942, when we're really at war. It made a warped kind of sense. It made a warped, yeah. It made a warped kind of sense.

A sense in a warped world. It makes complete sense. Exactly, right? It was a rational decision on the part of the bean counters. And all And all of a sudden there were hundreds of women doing this work, professional mathematicians. All right. So I get it that you can attract women into it. But if it's still the 40s and 50s where, you know, darker skinned people were not in the presence of opportunity, how do you get this community of African- American women rising up in the middle of this? Yeah. And remember, and this was also in the South, in the Jim Crow South, in Virginia. Add that to it. I don't even know how, that had to be impossible. 1943. I think you're lying. You made up the whole book. Well, you know,

fortunately for us, this is true. This is all true. It's actually true. So I'm just curious, Bill, this movie was set in the Jim Crow South, and NASA has centers all across the country, 10 of them, I guess, is the number, north and south, east and west. What was NASA's relationship to that era, to the Jim Crow South era? Well, the movie takes place during the NASA period, but the pre-story happens during World War II, right, so 1942.

Pre-NASA. Pre-NASA, so this is the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Fortunately, pretty close acronym, NACA. And so it just happened to be in Hampton, Virginia. And that was a part of the country where segregation was not only a policy, but it was a law. But if that was a law for the municipalities, but NASA's a federal, NAC was a law. But if that was a law for the municipalities, but NASA is a federal,

NACA is a federal agency. So are you still beholden to local laws if you set up shop in a Jim Crow county? I'm not sure there's a legal answer to that question. But in general, when NACA was set up and when Langley was set up, it absorbed the local culture. And over time, that became more of an issue as the country shifted during World War II, and those tensions came out and things started to change. So these three women featured in Hidden Figures, were they on your radar at the time? We have Katherine Johnson. These are actual people who lived. So she calculated launch trajectories for John Glenn in orbit.

We have Dorothy Vaughn, first black manager at NASA. And so that was Octavia Spencer's character. And Mary Jackson, first black female NASA engineer. So were they on your radar in the NASA history books? Oh, yeah. engineers. So were they on your radar in the NASA history books? Oh, yeah. Katherine Johnson in particular, because she was a phenomenon, in addition to being a beautiful person to start with. But she was just mathematically a phenomenon. And it's interesting that when Ted Melfi came to us asking for pictures, he said, I want the pictures of these people at work.

I said, well, Ted, NASA photographers don't walk around taking pictures of people at work. Right, right. You know, they do for some particular thing and purpose, but they don't come by my office to take my picture while I'm sitting at my desk. But we started looking, and there are actually a bunch of pictures of Katherine Johnson. And so that tells me that people at the time knew that she was something special. That's an interesting fact. Yeah. Right. That alone is evidence of this.

Yeah. Now, the other two, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, very hard to find. We had some pictures of Mary Jackson. Dorothy Vaughn didn't ever like to have her picture taken. So, there was one, precisely one U.S. government picture with Dorothy Vaughn in the picture, and she's on the side of the frame kind of leaning away from the camera. Well, the actress that plays Mary Jackson in the movie is Grammy-nominated singer Janelle Monáe. Well, she came by my office as well. My office, that's the place. That's the hangout. Anybody who's anybody come by my office. I asked her what she thought when she first read the script for the film.

Let's check it out. I thought it was fictional. I was like, wow, somebody is finally in my mind. Somebody is finally going to portray African-American women in a different light. We're not going to just be celebrated for our beauty, but for our brilliance. And I was excited. And once I was told that these women, in fact, did exist and they were directly responsible for getting our astronauts into space,

some of our first Americans into space, I was hurt. Because as an African-American woman, I'd never heard of Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vines, Katherine Johnson. Truly, these are American heroes. And I didn't know about this, so it became a personal responsibility for me to stop whatever it was that I was doing and to help celebrate these women who I feel have gone far too long without the acknowledgement that they deserve. Catch those half-moon earrings. Yeah, that was cool. She's very spacey in her own way.

She's got a little bit of geek underbelly there. Totally. So, Bill, why did it take so long to acknowledge these women? I think there are probably a couple of reasons why that's the case. Most of these women began their work in the 40s, the first, you know, women computers there, the African-American women computers started in the 1940s. And what they were doing was largely classified work. They were told not to talk about what they were doing outside the home, so they naturally didn't do that.

All these people were from the World War II generation, so that's sort of the second reason they're, you know, they defeated fascism, you know, doing a little calculation, not such a big deal maybe, they figured. But the third reason, and I don't really have a lot of data on this, but I think the third reason might actually be, to some extent, the environment of fear that might have surrounded these people. I mean, these were African-American women who had really good paying government jobs. Dorothy Vaughn was making $850 a year as a teacher the year before she got hired by the NACA. She was making $2,000 a year when she came to work for the NACA. Good paying jobs. They probably

didn't want to draw a lot of attention to themselves in that kind of environment. So I think some of it was a little caution on their part. Interesting. So I asked Janelle Monáe in my office with her moon earrings about taking on the role of Mary Jackson, who would become NASA's first black female engineer. Let's check it out. A lot of the women, with all due respect, because of them seeing their brothers and sisters being lynched by the way they looked at white people or spoke to white people, were very afraid to speak their minds. And Mary Jackson was not. She was not going to sit back idly and allow anybody to discriminate against her because of her race, her gender, or her class. And for me, it was for herself, but for the other women, to let them know that we have the power to change or poke a hole in the matrix. And that's

what she did. You know, it's either when these people walked in and they knew, okay, our goal is to get them into space. They had to put aside their race, their gender. And we either do it all together or we don't do it at all. Yeah. We just end the show right now. How am I going to add to that? I can't. How am I going to add to that? I can't.

Bill, where would NASA be today if it did not sort of reach in and tap the full American workforce? I think we'd have been in big trouble. It was a team effort. It has been a team effort throughout NASA's history to do all these things. Space is hard. We've been flying people in space for 60-odd years now, but it's still rocket science. As a matter of fact, it is rocket science. Literally rocket science.

And it's not easy. So we need the most talented people, and the scientific evidence is clear that a diverse workforce, particularly when you're doing the things that had never been done before, diverse workforce is particularly when you're doing the things that had never been done before, diverse workforce is really important. So NASA puts a really high premium on trying to attract as many. So today there are programs in place to reach for everybody. Absolutely.

One of the reasons we were so interested in the movie Hidden Figures and why NASA wasn't happy to be involved in the movie was we saw it as a way to inspire young people today to follow that path and prepare themselves for a future where they could be part of NASA. All right, I'll do it. Well, coming up, we'll take your questions about the math and science

behind America's great space race when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk. We are talking about NASA's Hidden Figures, a group of black female mathematicians who were pivotal in American space race. And I asked Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shatterly about women who work as human computers in the aeronautics industry, not only during the Second World War, but after.

Let's check it out. Tell me about this whole concept of a human computer. Right. Computer as a noun that applies to a human being. It did, yeah. And it's easy for us to think now, well, a human being. It did, yeah. And it's easy for us to think now, well, a computer is on our desktop, we plug it in, or it's our phone. It was just a computer was a job title. It's like someone who computes, and it was usually a woman.

Like typist? Like a typist. Computer? Yeah, trucker, someone who drives a truck. That was their professional job title. And it was a very important job, not always easy, tedious, eye-straining, but it had to be done right. Otherwise? Otherwise, well- The plane crashes. The plane crashes. Bad stuff happens.

The spacecraft does not go in the right direction. Well, let's follow that through. Rosie the Riveter, after the war, was sent back home. An entire ad campaign to get women back in the kitchen. Reconversion. And out of the factories. Exactly. Because the returning soldiers wanted their jobs back. Yeah. All right. So this didn't happen so much, it seems, with the female computers after the war. It didn't happen that much. Why? They had a cutback. Well, I think it's because aeronautics was still booming, you know?

So we won the war. The war, but the whole industry was burst. It was, you know, we won the war. You know, the Allied powers won the war, and a lot of that was because of airplanes, you know, we won the war. You know, the Allied powers won the war. And a lot of that was because of airplanes. You know, and it was like, okay, we won the war. What are we going to do next? We're going to fly faster than the speed of sound.

1947, you know, so right out of the war, it was like, okay, supersonic flight. You know, and then after that, everything. And then it was about the Cold War and the Soviets and the Korean War. And all of that was with airplanes and beating the Soviet planes. And then in 1957, we had Sputnik. So we've got like this whole series of things in which women doing these calculations and these computations were needed to help America achieve the next step on the space ladder. So it took the threat of dying to say, okay, we need anybody who can help us no matter your skin color.

I would have preferred it happened, gee, this is the right thing to do. But no, that's asking too much probably, particularly in the day. I think that's a great question. I mean, is it possible for us to have technological expansion, opening of the workplace without having a defense threat? Yeah. Is it possible for us to have technological expansion, opening of the workplace without having a defense threat? Yeah.

Is it possible? No. I'm not sure, but it hasn't been possible. Yeah, so Bill, would you agree it takes a national security threat to spawn that kind of advancement we saw during the space race? You know, a national security threat opens up spending on an investment on research of all sorts. And it also sort of loosens up the boundaries on lots of other things. So I think, you know, progress happens faster during those periods. When people don't want to die.

Yeah, that's a strong motivator. So let's just relive some of the history of this. So the Russians, 1957, fly Sputnik. And by some accounts, it was just, oh, it's just a satellite. And then you realize it was a hollowed-out ballistic missile shell with a little radio transmitter. And so we needed to one-up them on this. So in the day, how important were these human computers to NASA politically and militaristically? They were essential. I mean, you had to have people doing the computing work to get the job done. And so could we have beaten the Russians to the moon in the

1960s without, you know, Katherine Johnson? Yeah, could we have, you know, beaten them with one arm tied behind our back? Probably, maybe eventually, but we certainly wouldn't have beat the Soviets to the moon in the 1960s. And they're doing all these calculations by hand. Yeah, they did. The women computers were always extraordinary people. I mean, these are people with math skills that certainly boggle my mind. And so, you know, do we still have people like that, you know, a small cohort of people that could do that sort of thing? I think probably we find NASA still employs people who do that sort of work, but not manual computing anymore, but, you know, writing the computer programs and making sure they work properly. So that's an important part of the job.

And so that brings us to Cosmic Queries. Yes. We took questions from our fan base about math and science behind the space race of the 1950s and 1960s. So what do you have? All right. From Frank Kane of Orlando, Florida, what was the balance between human and computer navigation in the Apollo era? Ooh, good question. Bill.

Actually, the first contract of the Apollo program was for the guidance computer for the Apollo spacecraft because they knew that was going to be the hardest thing to develop. And so, at least during the Apollo era, most of the navigation was done by computer on the ground. There were computers on the ground that did navigation work and also the guidance computer. Just so they don't miss the moon. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of important not to miss the moon or Earth when you're coming back. If you shoot for the moon and you miss, you hit the stars.

Oh, I heard that one before. Oh, that's cute. Oh, that's cute. Okay, that's good. Good one. All right, next question. At Pdruck1977 from Twitter says, If you take away the modern computers, how would today's physicists manage alongside the 50s physicists?

I can give you my outlook on that. I think I am the youngest person to have been formally trained on a slide rule. Because the year I learned how to do a slide rule, how to operate a slide rule, was the same year the four-function calculator dropped in price from $200 to $30. And the next month, we abandoned slide rules. So I'm formally trained in them. But anyone younger than I am is not.

So if this is an apocalyptic fact, and you take away all computers today, I think everyone's hope. They'd look at a slide rule and wouldn't know what to do with it. I wouldn't know how to tell. Yeah. I think your people back in the 50s and 60s would dance circles around us today. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think so. My class at the Air Force Academy was the first class to be issued calculators instead of slide rules. Uh-huh.

So that's 1975. Yeah, that's about when that was. Yeah, yeah. Are we the same age? I just rolled over the big 6-0. 6-0, yeah, yeah, okay. Here, I'll get that. Okay. Okay. What, 6-0? Yeah, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, we got that one.

Next one. Abe Frommen from Facebook asks, what part of the moon landing was the hardest to calculate? Ooh, I don't know. Ooh. Hmm. What part was the hardest to calculate? Where to put the lights?

Just kidding. I'm just saying, I was saying that they were recording it from the studio because it was fake. Oh. Oh, please, please don't say that. I'm just kidding. She can say, she's a comedian, she can say anything. That's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'll tell you, we post things on the NASA history Facebook and Twitter account, and every time we post something about the Apollo land as a picture, we get the trolls come out and talk about how it never really happened. I don't know what planet they were on. I know it's real. I believe. He's not authorized to comment further on that fact.

So back to the question, the hardest part to calculate, I think one of the issues, and maybe, Neil, you don't understand this more than I would, the moon is not an even gravitational field. There's mass concentrations on the moon, and so it was hard to tell where they actually were trajectory-wise as they were going around the moon. It wasn't until we had a better map of the gravity field of the moon that we actually know better. Interesting. I think that's through some of the landings, particularly the first one. That's a great point because if the moon is like heaviest in the middle and it gets lighter as you get to the surface, typically that's how that

works, then the gravity field around it is perfectly symmetric. But if there's a mass concentration a little off center, then the orbit feels that. And your orbit then does not take a perfect shape around. And if you want to know where they are versus where they should be, yeah, you got to know. Excellent, excellent point. All right. Paul Disberg from Instagram asks, when they arrived at the moon, were the actions of the astronauts solely political, parentheses, planting the flag, or did they do scientific research as well?

Ah, the first things they did were science. I mean, the first thing... No, first they did was they planted the flag. They did that before they did science. They scooped up a... The first thing they did was they scooped up a sample of dirt. Wait, they did that before they planted the flag? Yeah.

I didn't see that. The first thing they did was step. Okay. They took a step. they did was step. Okay. They took a step. They took a step. Say a few things. Right, right. Okay.

Neil said a few words and then they walked around and they handed off equipment and did some stuff and then they put the flag up eventually. That's true. And they had a, on the first one they had a talk with President Nixon that was, you know, a symbolic thing. As Nixon said, the most expensive phone call ever placed, if I remember correctly. But the astronauts on the moon largely did, you know, they were there to do scientific work. And so there was a very long checklist of things they had to crank through.

And as we stayed longer on the moon on later missions, that list got longer and longer. They eventually had to give them a car to get driving around so they could find things on the last three missions. I like Jerry Seinfeld's reaction to that. He says, this is typical guy behavior. They take a rocket to the moon, but they still want a car to drive around. Why not? How American can you get? And my favorite experiment they did on the moon in the first mission was to lay down little mirror reflectors,

corner reflectors they're called, that will beam back a laser that you send from Earth. And you time that laser beam and you can get to very high precision the distance to the moon. And upon doing so, we learned what we had suspected, that the moon is spiraling away from Earth at about two inches a year. And one day, we will no longer have total solar eclipses because the size of the moon will not be large enough to cover the sun. That experiment is still in use. It's still in use. Oh, yeah. So there's a laser that goes from here to the moon. Oh, yeah. We got... Yeah. We got lasers. We got lasers. Wow. Lasers. We got that. All right.

Do you have one now? Yeah, I don't divulge that fact. Yeah. Yeah. No, we got lasers. If we got anything, we got lasers. Cool. Well, coming up, Bill Nye the Science Guy, good friend of mine, shares his thoughts on the pioneers of America's next space frontier

when StarTalk returns. StarTalk, from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We are talking about the role of women in the American space race. And I asked the author of Hidden Figures about what it must have been like being a female professional in the 1940s and 1950s and how the women featured in her book dealt with that reality. Check it out. Let's go back in time and just tell it like it was. So smart women became school teachers or possibly nurses.

Possibly nurses. What could you be? A secretary, a nurse, a school teacher? I might have left one out. Yeah. Okay. And that's kind of it. That was it. If you're fully educated.

Right. For the middle class professions, that was basically it. Sorry, of course. Right, right, right. All right. So now when you're a school teacher, you are a school teacher until? Until you get married. Until you get married. Then you're no longer a school teacher. And then you are asked to tender your resignation. You are a baby maker in the kitchen, possibly barefoot. All right. So were these women married? They were married. They were married teachers.

Did they have kids? They did have children. They did. Yet they stayed. Yet they stayed. That's really important information. Bill. Why were these women an exception to the traditional role of women in the workplace?

I think the main reason was that computing was always women's work. You think back to the computers who worked for astronomers. We had that early, back in the turn of the century. And it was generally work that the guys didn't want to do, so they gave it to the women. The menial work. Yeah. so they gave it to the women. The menial work.

Yeah. Yeah. And, in fact, we have an interesting memo from 1942 where a company asked the NACA about the computing pool and what they thought about it. And the NACA folks who wrote back said, it's really great because the women get about twice as much work done as the men and they're much more accurate and we don't have to pay them as much. Right, right.

Oh, that's in a memo. That's in a memo, yeah. Yeah, wow, okay. So during the war, they were able to bring women in to fill in men's jobs, but they were short of computers too, and there weren't more women with math degrees. And so 1943, the door finally opens up, and they say, these smart black women who were teachers who know math, let's bring some of them in. So that happens during the war.

Then after the war, high-speed research, the flying supersonic and the space race, all that stuff is a high priority. You still need these women to do the computing, and they have a particular job skill. And a good computer was worth their weight in gold. You wanted to keep those folks around. So all these strange things happened. The typical rules for women after World War II were,, you know, you get pregnant or you get married, you got to leave. You get pregnant, forget it. And if you have kids, we don't want you. Not true for computers. Computers get married, they keep coming to work. Computers, they get pregnant. There's actually some evidence that we found in the archives of supervisors turning a blind eye to very pregnant computers and ignoring that until the very last minute when they actually had to let them go have their babies, right? But then

they had their babies and many of them would come back. You know, they wanted to come back to the NACA and be a computer again. Come on back. They got their jobs back because they were so highly prized for those particular skills and their ability to, you know, do those calculations. And they would have been particularly rare because back in 1950, our data show that about 30% of women worked outside of the home compared with more than 50% today. Yeah. They're really an anomaly in a lot of ways. During the space race, they're doing things that has never been done before. They have to think outside the box, the proverbial box. So do you think that culture is fundamentally more open to different kinds of people participating in it?

I think so. That's one of the nice things about working at NASA is that it's an engineering culture. NASA is an organization where someone says, show me the data. Everybody's like, yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense to me. And people are willing to follow the data wherever it goes. And if this is clearly what the answer is, if what matters is how you perform and not how you look, then that's the data, and let's go with it. So, of course, in the old days, all the astronauts were sort of military pilot types and all the same skin color. What is the NASA profile today of the astronauts class?

Well, in fact, we just hired a brand-new astronaut class this summer. I heard about that. A lot of press surrounding that. Yeah, but people are really excited about it. It's a very mixed group. The first class of astronauts that was not just all white guys was the class of 78, which is the first group. The shuttle. The first shuttle.

Yeah, yeah. The decision to use military pilots was actually an interesting one. Back in the 50s when NASA was first thinking about hiring astronauts, they were originally going to advertise for circus performers and mountain climbers, and they had this long list of professions. People who get shot out of cannons, this kind of thing. Yeah, seriously. And then the question came up,

well, how are we going to be able to insure these people? And gee, we're going to have to get security clearances on them. And there's all these difficulties. And they went to President Eisenhower over Christmas time in 1958 and said, well, this is what we're going to do to advertise for astronauts. And he said, what are you, crazy? He says, we can solve all that. We just get some military guys and bring them over

because they already have security clearances. They'll do what we tell them to do. And they're used to these kind of dangers. And you don't even pay them very much. And we don't have to pay them very much. Yeah, exactly. I still want to see a circus person go to Spain. So the astronaut corps looks very much like America.

How about the rest of NASA? Does that follow suit as well? Yeah. We've got about 18,000 people who work at NASA and about a third of them are women. Well, so regarding the modern-day workforce at NASA, we have someone joining this conversation. We have NASA engineer Tracy Drain.

Tracy, right now you're live on our video call. Oh, there you go, Tracy. Hey, Tracy. So, Tracy, what do you do for NASA? I am currently a systems engineer, and right now I'm the deputy chief engineer for the Juno mission, which arrived at Jupiter last July. Love me some Juno missions.

So I bet I am not alone in asking you this very basic question. What is a systems engineer? That's right. When you think about something that is complicated like a car, you might have people who focus specifically on how to build the engines or how to build a chassis, et cetera. Just like with spacecraft, we have telecom and propulsion and thermal. A systems engineer is someone who's not an expert in any one of those systems,

but works with all of the experts to ensure that what we're developing, the thing that's going to work all together as a whole. Oh, so if the whole thing breaks, it's your fault. That's exactly right. Yeah, everything's got to work together. That's right. Whoa, okay. And so that's cool.

Now, this might be like picking your favorite child, but what is your favorite mission that you've worked on? Or what's the coolest thing you've done in your career so far? I might get into a little bit of trouble for this one since I've been on Juno for the longest time in my career. But I have to say that my heart still belongs with Kepler, which discovered so many exoplanets and has just changed our whole understanding of the nature of planets and our galaxy and in the universe. And I'm actually about to transition

onto a mission called Psyche, which is going to go visit one of the more interesting asteroids in our solar system. So I'm slowly working my way around the solar system with my career. Well, very good. Well, thank you, Tracy, for joining us on StarTalk. All right. Excellent. So up next, more on the hidden history of the mathematicians that put the first Americans in space when StarTalk returns.

Welcome back to StarTalk. We're featuring my interview with Margot Lee Shatterly, author of the best-selling book Hidden Figures. It's a story about pushing the boundaries of what we can accomplish as humans in a divided country and the unity found in the pursuit of having pushed those boundaries. And I asked Margot how a group of black women in Jim Crow South could become heroes of the space race. Check it out. Before the civil rights movement meant Martin Luther King in the 1960s, there was a guy named A. Philip Randolph, labor leader, the largest black labor union in the country. And he said to then President Roosevelt, open these war jobs to Negroes. Tear down this wall. Tear down this wall. We want to participate in the bounty of these war jobs to Negroes. Tear down this wall. Tear down this wall. We want to participate in

the bounty of these war jobs. I mean, we were coming out of the Depression. Roosevelt was very labor supportive in his politics and in his philosophies. And, and. So he's like the right guy to bring this message to. Well, and it took a little bit of a, you know, maybe a little more than that because A. Philip Randolph said, if you do not open these jobs, we're going to convene 100,000 Negroes in the national capital, Washington, D.C., which maybe wasn't something that Roosevelt wanted so much to happen. Particularly as the country's on the eve of war. And so instead of doing that, they came to an agreement and Roosevelt passed Executive Order 8802, desegregating the federal government and opening these jobs to African-Americans, but also Mexican-Americans, Jewish-Americans, essentially prohibiting discrimination on the part of the federal government and the defense industry. Two years later, five black women walked through the door at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. And so they had a white computing pool and they had a black computing pool. And everybody knew it wasn't called the

white pool and the black pool. It's called the East pool and the West pool. Everybody knew that the West pool was the pool with the black women. But they also had colored bathrooms, and they had a colored cafeteria. And, you know, their path ended at the moon. Yeah. It's a great line. Path ended at the moon. Could you just put some context around this period for what NASA was doing? Sure.

Well, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, to give it its full name at the time, and now the NASA Langley. And Langley was an aeronautic pioneer at the turn of the century, if I remember correctly. An unsuccessful one. Yeah, that's right. But his successor at the Smithsonian picked the name.

Okay. So that's how it wound up being Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. He wasn't the one who figured out how to fly. No. Yeah. There's a really great story about that. That apparently you're not going to tell. Well, the Wright brothers learned how to fly.

Langley made two attempts to fly his aerodrome with a pilot on board, and both of them failed. He launched it off a houseboat in the Potomac, and both of them crashed. And the last one was about two weeks before. Two weeks before the Wright brothers successfully flew. He'd gotten a lot of money from the government to do this. The Department of War had asked them to build an airplane. So you wind up with Langley not succeeding.

The Wright brothers talking about how they succeeded. And Langley winds up actually dying a broken man a couple of years later. His successor at the Smithsonian, a guy by the name of Walcott, Langley was the head of the Smithsonian at the time. Walcott winds up being the guy who's in charge of the executive committee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. And when the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics decides to build a laboratory, he decides that we're going to name it after my former boss, who probably would have flown first if those Wright brothers hadn't gotten in the way. That was a funny story. It's sad.

He died a broken man. It is sad. Interesting. A lot of people that worked at Langley would wonder why it wasn't called the Wright Research Center. Well, my friend Bill Nye, the science guy, has some thoughts on what the space frontier ought to look like. Let's check it out. Greetings, Neil. We're here at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum on the west side of New York, New York.

During the space race, astronauts like John Glenn would go streaking above the Earth's atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour in little aluminum cans like this one. There was a lot of mathematics involved, and the people who did the figuring were often women who were virtually hidden in the workforce because of their ancestry. Consider the following. After you light a rocket engine and the fuel starts burning, with every moment that goes by, the rocket weighs less.

So how much fuel do you start with? How high will it go? Where will it land? Someone has to figure these things out. It's rocket science, my friends. And the problems don't care who solves them. But those problems were solved by the hidden figures of the space race. Back to you, Neil.

Up next, choosing imagination over fear just to find America's place in space. StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview with actress and singer Janelle Monae, one of the stars of the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. And Janelle plays one of the female mathematicians that helped launch the first Americans into orbit. And she says she's a nerd in real life, too. I love it. Check it out.

I just want everyone to know that I am a proud geek. I'm a proud nerd. Card carrier. I'm constantly learning. I think that it's important to be around smarter geeks. I think that it's important to be around smarter geeks. You start looking at things differently, and your ideas and the collision of ideas creates this sonic boom. So, telling this story about these three women who did this, knowing that there were women who were geeks, and they were beautiful, and they could be both, is so inspiring. And so I just hope that people know that you just,

you can be a cool, creative geek and change the world. So Bill, so NASA's kind of famous for geek culture, I think. Absolutely, yeah. Of course, Langley Research Center is 100 years old this year, and they're our mother center, as we've referred to them, the first center of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and then the other ones grew from there. Ten centers, lots of exciting stuff going on at NASA.

Every one of those centers are people doing exciting work, just like we have astronauts 250 miles above us right now at the International Space Station doing research. What are you saying? Geeks are spread around the whole country. We're all over the place. Well, I asked Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly what key lessons she would have us learn from this story. Let's check it out.

Never let fear get the best of imagination and curiosity. You know, I mean, it takes tremendous imagination to send someone to the moon. I mean, this ball of light in the sky, and we're going to send somebody all the way there and put them in this little tuna can and put them on a candle and send them out. No, not a candle, a bomb.

A bomb, a bomb. A controlled bomb. You know, we're going to send them, shoot them out there. I mean, that takes a hell of a lot of imagination, too. And then we're going to bring them back safely. We're not just going to shoot them out there? I mean, that takes a hell of a lot of imagination. And then we're going to bring them back safely. We're not just going to let them leave. We're going to bring them back.

It takes gonads to do that. It really does. And it takes imagination to know that that's right. See, gonads, did you see what I did there? That's the gender-neutral way. Very good. Very modern. Yeah, see? You know, and it takes a lot of imagination to say,

well, any of us can do any of these things. You can be a woman, a black woman, and do math. You know, that you could look at anyone, any of us, and say, well, you know, let me imagine what that person might be. Right, but then there's a place where the rubber hits the road, and that's access to opportunity. It is. So that's where the perseverance matters. The perseverance is another thing. That's where the perseverance matters.

The perseverance is another thing. And one of the things that I think speaks to that, that Katherine Johnson, when you ask her, well, listen, you were a black woman in the segregated South telling your boss that you could do the math to send the man into space and get him back safely. That man, that military man. That military man, that clean cut, you know, all American guy. Right. And, you know, and meanwhile, there's the segregated bathroom and the segregated cafeteria. You're a woman. You know, how did you know how to do that? And she says, you know what?

It goes back to something my dad told me when I was little. And he said, listen, he said this to all of his children. You are no better than anyone else and no one is better than you. And, you know, if we live in an environment where we're always afraid of the future and we're always afraid of each other and we're, you know, we're just paralyzed by fear, well, there will be no progress. You know, we have to let our imagination and our curiosity triumph over fear. I think ultimately that's what the space race was about. That's what these women were all about.

Allow curiosity and allow imagination, the better parts of our nature, to triumph over fear. So Bill, how would you summarize the legacy of the women featured in Hidden Figures? I think that when we're at our best, when we're doing our best work, we were looking at excellence and inclusion to get all the best talent onto the work that needed to be done. and inclusion to get all the best talent onto the work that needed to be done. And I think that the case of these women in particular shows what the benefit is of doing that. And as a NASA historian, I can say that the verdict of our history is clear. It's not the package that you come in. It's the performance you bring to the job that makes the difference. And just showing representation to people will inspire other people to keep doing these kinds of things.

Like, I think this movie Hidden Figures is huge for people to know that these are women that existed and that they can do the same thing. When I think of a workforce doing whatever, I don't care. You can ask, who comprises that workforce? Is it one demographic, one skin color, one gender, one religion? And you realize, we created these tribal boundaries among us. I am this group, you are that group. we will do this, you will do that. And as a scientist, I'm thinking what's going on? Science doesn't care what

religion you are, what skin color you are, what gender you are. The value of pi is the same on this side of the earth and is on the other side of the earth as it is across the universe and across time. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that it was science and science's cousin, engineering, that brought people together. People that laws had them separated, not only by skin color, but by gender. Science knows no color boundaries. It is not only international, it is universal. That is a cosmic perspective.

You've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, keep looking up!