The version of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson most people carry came from a screenplay, and a fact-against-fiction accounting sets three of its departures beside the record. The record is plainer than the film and it is better, because what these three did at NASA Langley is more specific than what was written for them.
Start with Katherine Johnson and the flight everybody remembers. In 1961, she analyzed the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission, the first human spaceflight completed by the United States. The following year she verified an electronic computer’s calculations for Friendship 7, the mission on which John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. NASA’s own account is careful about the difference: she checked the computer’s math for Glenn’s February 1962 flight. Glenn’s line about her has outlived the arithmetic. “If she says they’re good, then I am ready to go,” he said.
Dorothy Vaughan’s promotion is the part the film has least room for. In 1949, she was promoted to lead the West Computing group, which made her the first Black supervisor at the agency, and she helmed West Computing for nearly a decade. NASA calls her its first African American manager. She oversaw both Johnson and Jackson, which means the two women the film follows were working for a third.
Mary Jackson’s classroom is where the wording matters most. The courses she needed were graduate-level math and physics, run after work and managed by the University of Virginia, and they were held at then-segregated Hampton High School. She needed special permission from the City of Hampton to sit in that room with her white peers. She completed the courses, earned the promotion, and in 1958 became NASA’s first Black female engineer.
Getting the details right is not pedantry. A segregated city having to approve one woman’s seat in a classroom is a harder fact than a courtroom scene, and running a computing group for a decade is a bigger job than standing beside somebody else’s. The film made the three of them famous. The record makes them exact.
