Quote:
Originally Posted by onevoice
Maybe, but probably not. Why didn't he ever mention it in his book.
The general idea of a single person being the go-no go determination flies in the face of everything NASA did, especially if it is asking a person who does calculations, not the person who actually DEVELOPED THE EQUATIONS  Those types of calculations were done by teams of people, and took lots of time.
There were a lot of unsung heroes in the space program, this movie, like most, mixes a lot of interpretation and politics into the "facts" |
Actual interview with Katherine Johnson.
''You did more than calculations — in the film, you created “new” math to go from an elliptical to a parabolic orbit. Did you think of it as cutting-edge math at the time?
It was pure math. It was the solution to the problem. That was what we did. That’s why they needed mathematicians.
It was a good movie with a solid basis in fact. Katherine Johnson was a mathematical savant. I don't doubt that for a second.
There’s this lovely part in the movie in which your character turns to “old” math — Euler’s method — to figure out how to get John Glenn back down from orbit. Did that really happen?
It seemed logical to me. I could see in my mind what I needed and sort of worked backwards.
Did you ever have to fight to have authorship or co-authorship of a report?
The movie and book were pretty accurate. Women (“girls,” aka mathematicians) did not have their names included as authors on technical paper in the early days.''
''Did you ever have to go toe-to-toe with them over the numbers?
After a while, they learned to respect my answers because they were always correct.''