Swapna Krishna is a freelance writer, editor, and giant space and sci-fi geek. At Tor.com she tagged
five books to read if you loved Hidden Figures, including:
Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt
While Hidden Figures tells the story of the black women breaking barriers in NASA’s Langley office, Holt’s story takes the reader to the west coast, to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which works on NASA’s unmanned robotic space missions. In the 1940s and 1950s, JPL recruited women of all different backgrounds (but mostly white women) to work as human computers, much like Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Katherine Johnson did at Langley on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects. Holt follows different women through the years at JPL, outlining their almost-forgotten contributions to our nation’s space program.
Read about
another book on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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