![]() “Still, I didn’t live in a world where Jim Crow laws required that African-American women be segregated from their white colleagues, so we’ve certainly come a long way,” Cannad adds. But as hard as I worked, I still ran into the disadvantages of often being the ‘only’. ![]() My mind was set on being another, so I worked hard at the George Washington Carver High School of Engineering & Science in Philadelphia and then at Purdue University where I got my engineering degree. “ Mae Jemison was a big role model for me, but she was one of the very few. “Growing up, I was obsessed by the shuttle launches, and I was a big fan of sci-fi shows, such as ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, but it was rare to see women, much less women of color, who were known for their accomplishments in the fields of space travel and technology. “As an African-American woman, an engineer trained in orbital dynamics, and a space geek, I can relate to the passion and problems these amazing mathematicians faced,” Cannad says. One of those experts is Khali Cannad, an aerospace engineer at Northrop Grumman. The women in “Hidden Figures” helped define orbits, which required difficult calculations that are still done by today’s top aerospace experts at Northrop Grumman and other firms. Known as “computers” before electronic computers existed, they performed thousands of calculations by hand while working in the West Area Computing Unit (West Unit). Vaughan, Jackson and Johnson were part of a group of Black female mathematicians at NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their careers launched during the late 1950s and early 1960s, a pivotal era when the Space Race overlapped with the Civil Rights Movement. The film focuses on three Black women - Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson - who calculated mathematical data that was essential to the first successful space missions. ![]() ![]() Movie true storyo of black nasa women movie#“ Hidden Figures” is a movie that tells the true story of a team of African American women whose work led to several breakthroughs in space travel. ![]()
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