Meet The NASA's Desi Women

Sixty years after a team of coloured women helped America put a man in space, four Indian-origin women at NASA talk about what has changed

- Anjuly Mathai

The year is 1961, when the US and the USSR are at the height of the Cold War, and all attention is focused on space. In October 1957, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into the earth’s orbit, thus gaining a distinct advantage in the ‘race for space’. The next year, to regain lost ground, president Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an order for the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). At NASA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, there was a segregated west side whose existence not many NASA employees knew of. This was where the coloured women—or the ‘West Computers’—who did much of the space agency’s complex mathematical equations, sat.

Theodore Melfi’s biographical drama, Hidden Figures (2016)—about the lives of three path-breaking West Computers—begins after the Soviet Union’s Vostok 3KA-2 successfully orbits the earth in March 1961, carrying a mannequin and a dog. There is a note of desperation in the voice of Al Harrison, the head of NASA’s Space Task Group, as he demands a human computer who is good with analytical geometry to do the agency’s orbital calculations. A missive is sent to the west side, and Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson becomes the first West Computer to work with the Space Task Group. As she enters a room full of white men who pay her scant regard, a trash bin is thrust at her. “This wasn’t cleared yesterday,” says one of the men. “Oh no, I’m not here to…,” she tries explaining, but the man has already left.