February 4, 2018
Leading in the Direction of Unity
By Alan Stein In the movie Hidden Figures, Kevin Costner plays Al Harrison, a mission director of NASA in April 1961 when the Soviets launched the first man into Earth’s orbit. Harrison (a composite character) had a single-minded mission: successfully launch an American into orbit and safely return him to Earth. NASA was just beginning to transition into the computer age, and so they had some uncertainty about the trajectory calculations provided by the agency’s IBM computer. Astronaut John Glenn, preparing for the Friendship 7 launch that would send him into orbit in February 1962, asked for mathematical genius Katherine
