The official trailer for Hidden Figures is here!
HIDDEN FIGURES is the incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)—brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.
Yep. I’m crying at work. These women are the reason I am where I am today.
They’re the reason, that when I told my daddy in 2nd grade that I was going to be an astronaut he didn’t laugh. He signed me up for space camp and flew with me to Atlanta and drove me to Hunstville so I could attend (sleeping on a friend of a friends couch in Birmingham til the week was over and he could pick me up). When he heard that the next shuttle launch would be the first time a female commander was in charge, he found a way to make sure we were at the launch of STS-93. He found a Civil Air Patrol squadron nearby and made sure that they taught me how to fly before I turned 16. When my highschool didn’t have a computer program past the basics, he went into my school every day for a month to talk to the principal and the computer teacher set up a computer for me in the back next to is so he could teach me Java and C++ in between other classes. That when I applied to the Air Force Academy and MIT (the only two colleges I applied for) his only complaint was that MIT would cost him money, so I better pick the AirForce. And when I picked MIT over the AirForce he found a way to pay for my tuition.
And that first spring when I got to call him and tell him I wouldn’t be coming home for the summer, I’d be working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, training Astronauts on the equipment I’d been helping to design at MIT. Well he didn’t say much. He just said, “Good.” and “When we moving you down there? You’re brother’s in San Antonio. We’ll fly in there and make him drive us over.” Like it was foretold. Like he knew it was going to happen.
I have over 20 spacecraft in LEO, the astronauts handle work I’ve done on a daily basis on the ISS, and this September my first interplanetary mission is launching because the black women that came first made a place in the space industry for me. And because my father (thanks to his own struggles to find space for a black man in aerospace engineering) didn’t for a second think I wouldn’t do what I told him I was going to do when I was a baby.
I’m gonna be a fucking wreck when I see this movie. And to think, that finally people will know what women like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Annie Easley (fixed the Centaur energy equations and formed the basis of all modern rocketry), and Melba Roy (head of the Goddard computers for the first comm satellites) did for the American space industry. That there’s actually gonna be acknoledgment of the place black women have held at NASA since the very beginning.
Imma be a wreck. And I can’t wait.
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