Pioneers in Tech: Dorothy Vaughn, one of the women of Apollo
The woman who became NASA’s first Black manager was honored in July with the renaming of a central building at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Learn all about her trailblazing career in this edition of Pioneers in Tech!
On July 19—55 years after the Apollo 11 mission—the campus’ Building 12 was renamed the “Dorothy Vaughn Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo.” The honor recognized Dorothy Vaughn, the “computer” portrayed by Octavia Spencer in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Portraits of the women who made the Apollo missions possible line the hallways of the Dorothy Vaughn Center.
Trailblazing mathematician
Born Sept. 20, 1910, in Kansas City, Missouri, Vaughn earned a degree in mathematics from Wilberforce University in 1929. When World War II required President Franklin D. Roosevelt to loosen restrictions on race and gender to fill defense positions, Vaughn left her job as a high school teacher in Virginia to join the staff at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. She took the position with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the forerunner to NASA) as a temporary war job. Still, in 1949, NACA promoted her to manager of the segregated “West Area Computing” group of Black female mathematicians. Until NACA became NASA in 1958, Vaughn led the unit and enforced the Jim Crow laws that required them to use separate dining and restroom facilities from white colleagues.
With the introduction of NASA, the organization abolished segregated work groups. Vaughn and other West alumna joined the Vehicle Analysis and Computation Division (ACD). She became an expert FORTRAN programmer.
Vaughn retired in 1971. She championed the West “computers,” actively advocating for their pay and promotions. In a 1994 interview, she said: “I changed what I could, and what I couldn’t, I endured.”
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Photo: Victor Lopes Tonin / Unsplash
