During the nine day, two minute Apollo 14 mission, three American astronauts – Stuart Roosa, Edgar Mitchell, and Alan Shepard – walked on the Moon twice, collected 42.8 kilograms of lunar samples, and, famously, Shepard hit two golf balls across the lunar surface before returning safely to Earth.
The world celebrated their achievement, marveled at their success and perhaps even created countless myths about what they did or didn’t do on the Moon, and what they saw or didn’t see.
For the scientific community, however, February 9, 1971, was officially recorded in humanity’s space conquest timeline as the day Apollo 14 returned to Earth, marking a new phase in humanity’s exploration of the cosmos.
Yet for decades, an essential part of this story remained largely overlooked: the space race of the 1960s was not just about astronauts and rockets. Since the early 1940s, hundreds of women had been working at NASA as mathematicians, “human computers,” programmers and engineers. The trajectories of spaceflights, fuel consumption models, lunar maneuvering plans and the safety of returns all depended on their calculations.
Programmer Margaret Hamilton played a pivotal role. She led the development of onboard software for the Apollo program. The programs she and her team created prevented a system failure during the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing, ensuring a successful touchdown on the Moon. Hamilton’s work laid the foundation for modern software engineering as a distinct branch of engineering.
Mathematician Katherine Johnson’s calculations were crucial for both reaching the Moon and returning safely to Earth. By manually verifying the results of automated systems with paper and pencil, she ensured the precision and safety of spaceflights. Her mathematical models were used in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.
Dorothy Vaughan, who led NASA’s team of African-American female “computers,” recognized early on the risks posed by technological change and was among the first to master programming, later training her team in these new skills. Thanks to Vaughan, dozens of women retained their professional expertise in the computer age and contributed to the computational work of the Apollo program.
Engineer and aerodynamics specialist Mary Jackson worked with flight test data to improve the structural design of rockets and spacecraft. Her contributions were essential to the technical solutions applied throughout the Apollo program.
These women, who began their careers as “human computers,” continuously updated and applied their exceptional knowledge and skills during a transformative period in science. They were highly valued employees for decades, yet for just as long, remained largely unknown and underappreciated.
It was not until 2016, through historical research and cultural recognition including the film Hidden Figures, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book that the public finally learned about the unprecedented contributions of these women scientists. Their work played a crucial role in advancing humanity’s scientific and technological progress, both in space exploration and in the field of information technology.
