Best Wishes for 2022 with this Tribute to Three Extraordinary Women of Space Engineering.

A little over a century ago, three black women were born in the United States who, thanks to their skill and tenacity, left an indelible mark in the history of NASA and the conquest of space. Their challenges and successes counted in a book titled “Hidden Figures” which was adapted for film in 2016. These three remarkable women are Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan.

Dorothy Vaughan graduated in Mathematics from Wilberforce University, Ohio, in 1929. She taught during 14 years in public schools of the state of Virginia which applied at that time the segregationist laws "Jim Crow". She succeeded in entering NACA (which a few years later would be called NASA) in 1943 where she joined a team of black women mathematicians, a segregated unit, whose mission was to calculate or verify the calculations of the teams of space projects mainly made up of white men.

She supervised, as acting, this team of women from 1949. With the arrival of the first IBM computers, she will understand the interest of developing her profession towards programming and will learn on her own a new programming language called Fortran. Regarding being an African American woman during that time in Langley, she remarked, "I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured.". She worked in the Numerical Techniques division through the 1960s and 1970s as supervisor. She died on November 10, 2008, aged 98. In 2019, the Vaughan crater on the far side of the Moon was named in her honor.

Born in 1921, Mary Jackson graduated in Mathematics and physical science from Hampton University University, Ohio, in 1942. She taught mathematics at an African-American school in Calvert County, Maryland. She worked as a receptionist and clerk at the Hampton Institute's Health Department. In 1951, Jackson was recruited by NACA and worked with the engineer Kazimierz Czaenecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. Czarnecki encouraged her to undergo training so that she could be promoted to an engineer. She needed to take graduate level courses in mathematics and physics to qualify for the job. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to allow her to attend the night classes. After completing the courses, she was promoted to aerospace engineer in 1958, and became NASA's first black female engineer.

She was specialized in fluid mechanics and from measurements made in tunnels, she developed air flow models to quantify the thrust and drag forces exerted on the structures of planes, rockets and space capsules. By 1979, Jackson had achieved the most senior title within the engineering department. She decided to take a demotion in order to serve as an administrator in the Equal Opportunity Specialist field. NASA's headquarters building in Washington was renamed the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters in a virtual ceremony on February 26, 2021.

The third of this trio of women is Katherine Johnson (born Coleman in 1918). She showed strong mathematical abilities from an early age. In 1939, she was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Like her friend Dorothy, she worked in a pool of women performing math calculations for the NACA. Katherine was temporarily assigned to help the all male flight research team. Katherine's knowledge of analytical geometry helped make quick allies of male bosses and colleagues to the extent that, "they forgot to return me to the pool ".

One of my favorite scenes from the movie "Hidden Figures" is when Katherine Johnson has the idea of solving the problem of entry into the atmosphere of the Mercury capsule by using Euler's method to discretize the trajectory having for initial condition the orbital elliptical trajectory and as a final condition the parabolic fall trajectory, every two described with formal analytical equations. Long before computers and for the first time in the world, she iteratively calculated thousands of calculation steps to approximate this re-entry trajectory into the atmosphere.

She calculated the trajectory for the May 5, 1961 space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. John Glen didn't trust computers and wanted Katherine to recheck all the calculations herself. She also helped to calculate the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11, flight to the Moon. In a way, she had the responsablity of the astronauts lifes of in her hands ...

President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. President Obama said at the time, "Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society's expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity's reach."

As an engineer in the early 90s, I did during my Thesis numerical analysis for modeling by finite element methods and Fortran programming of the models that I had developed. Thirty years later, when I see all the technology available, computers that fit in the hand, programming languages with scientific libraries in all disciplines of physics and chemistry, calculation codes in CFD and FEA with integrated non-linear modules, measurement sensors and real-time software for post-processing and signal analysis, I tell myself that men and women of good will and of all skin colors must work together for the good of our planet.

So let's pay tribute to these three extraordinary women who have shown us what is beautiful in engineering in terms of innovation and tolerances. A century after their birth, what a source of inspiration for all of us engineers and scientists for this year 2022!

(Sources: “Hidden Figures” Book and Movie, Wikipedia)