The Hidden Figures of NASA Glenn in Cleveland
The film "Hidden Figures," up for Best Picture tonight at the Oscars, shines a light on the black women who were known as "human computers" at NASA during the genesis of the space program and the height of the space race against Russia.
Until the film, many people had no idea about the contributions these women made and the struggles they endured. Among those who were unaware are three black women who now work in leadership positions at the NASA Glenn Research Center. You can call them the "Hidden Figures" of Cleveland.
- Story by Michael K. McIntyre, The Plain Dealer
Their NASA career paths were smoothed by the women depicted in the film. And now that they've seen it, these women are inspired not only by the history, but by the potential for a more diverse future.
Classes of students are watching the film. Young people are talking about – yikes! – math. The message is getting through to girls and specifically African-American girls – something Mary Lobo, Terrian Nowden and Nancy Hall have worked to accomplish throughout their own careers.
With the movie's buzz, and their own life stories and excitement about science, these hidden figures of Cleveland want to inspire the next generation of young women and minorities to pursue careers in the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and math.
The modern-day hidden figures did not struggle through Civil Rights-era segregation. None had to run a half mile to a blacks-only bathroom at work, as one of the women in the film did. But still today, when they look around the labs and test facilities of their sprawling campus, when they attend conferences with their peers, when they visit colleges, what they see is a field still dominated by white men. At Nasa Glenn, 15 percent of the 1,602 Civil Service employees are women. About 4 percent, 64 employees, are black females.
A National Science Board report in 2015 noted that women fill about 28 percent of science and engineering jobs nationally, and African-Americans fewer than 5 percent.
Hidden Figures legacy in Cleveland
The film, based on a book of the same name, focuses on three brilliant African-American women -- Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson -- who worked at the Langley Research Center in Virginia as the United States prepared to send John Glenn into orbit in the heat of the space race against Russia and as NASA prepared to enter the era of the IBM computer.
I spent some time with three brilliant African-American women who work at the NASA Glenn Research Center now – Nowden is an electrical engineer and power systems analyst; Hall is an aerospace engineer and project manager; and Lobo is the Space Simulations Facility manager.
Each works to support the International Space Station, the next-generation Orion spacecraft and, perhaps one day, an astronaut mission to Mars.
Here are their stories.
Mary Lobo is Space Simulation Facility Manager at Glenn's Lewis Field campus. She is responsible for coordinating internal and external tests in over two dozen vacuum chambers and the strategic planning to enable the chambers to be ready to support NASAfuture missions. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)
Mary Lobo, 40, Space Simulation Facility Manager
Lobo grew up in East Cleveland. She was a smart kid, but content to coast. That was until junior high, when her mother, Mary Owens Muhammad, laid down the law. Her father, Willie Owens Muhammad, was supportive of her track-and-field athletic endeavors. The "softie," she says. But her mom pushed the grades.
"My mother said, 'You better get all A's from now on,' " said Lobo. Her mother, a daycare administrator, hadn't graduated from college. But she was determined to make sure Mary and her older sister, Adrianne, did.
Mary listened to her mom. Gifted in math, science and art, she graduated from Shaw High School as the class valedictorian in 1994. She applied to a number of Ivy League colleges and was accepted to all of them. Dartmouth was tops on her list. But the price would be steep, "and we weren't a well-off family," she said.
Case Western Reserve University, where her sister already was enrolled, offered scholarships that, combined with other scholarships and grants, covered her costs. But what to study?
"I remember telling my mom I wanted to be a cartoonist, and she said, 'Uh uh. You can be a doctor or lawyer or anything else like that,'" said Lobo. She discovered later that NASA's first black female astronaut got similar advice. Dr. Mae Jemison, who flew on Endeavor in 1992, got this advice from her mother: "You can always dance if you're a doctor, but you can't doctor if you're a dancer."
Starting her career at NASA
Lobo graduated in 1999 with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked in manufacturing before signing on as a NASA contractor. She was downsized out of that job in 2005 – "The most difficult moment of my career," she says -- but eventually came back and joined NASA as contractor again and finally as a full-time civil servant in 2010.
She now is in charge of coordinating tests in a dozen vacuum chambers in three buildings at the NASA facilities. These chambers mimic the atmosphere and temperature of space, and equipment is tested in them before being launched into space.
And like the dancing doctor, she's still the artistic engineer, designing clothes and pursuing other creative paths.
She said she connected with the women in the film, and particularly with Katherine Johnson, "because she is in the environment where she is the only one."
"Though the feelings of the personnel have changed compared with the '50s to now, I'm still, like, the only one. I look around and, pretty much, it's all white men in every capacity," she said. "Whether it's at work, when I go to conferences, when I go to working groups with experts in the field, I look around and I don't see myself. And it's kind of lonely and that's what I felt that she was feeling. Things haven't changed so much, but they have."
Mary Lobo is responsible for coordinating internal and external tests in over two dozen vacuum chambers, like the one seen behind her, at NASA Glenn in Cleveland. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)
The need for "the push," and responding to it
Lobo stands around five feet tall and she has a slight build. She admits it takes some getting used to for people to perceive her as the boss.
“People are somewhat surprised when they see this small-package little black woman and I’ve got this big title,” she says. “I don’t think that in my career, in my lifetime, that will totally go away. The mentality still persists. It takes generations to get that out. So I just feel like I am going to face it and that’s part of my job, part of my reality.”
The push by her mother preceded many “pushes” along the way that helped her succeed at NASA. And she shares her story with young people in the hopes she’ll help propel them, too.
“I talk about my mother because she was the earliest support I had to push me,’’ she says. “Even here, when I became the facility manager. . . I remember doing one of our tours, we have a lot of VIPs who come through here to learn about our area. And I was standing back. All white males, of course, they could be CEOs, they could be congressmen. And I was standing back. And I literally had a mentor push me and say, ‘Get up there. It’s your facility. You belong.’
“We need the push. I needed that push to say, ‘Mary, you belong here, you are intelligent, you deserve it. These are your peers and you can be their boss.’ The push really makes a difference.”
Lobo and her husband, Gladimir, a real estate agent, live in Woodmere and have three kids -- sons 13 and 5, and a daughter, 2. Her mom lives with them. And Lobo aspires to be like her mother.
“It’s about the push, at home and at work. I’m going to push all of them, the same push my parents gave me,” she said. “I look at my daughter and say, 'Look, STEM might be for you, baby!'”
Terrian Nowden's NASA Glenn office is filled with inspirational quotes, reminders of things she loves, like skiing, and objects that brighten her day or make her think. (LynnIschay/The Plain Dealer)
Terrian Nowden, 53, electrical engineer, power systems analyst
Terrian Nowden was a tinkerer.
"I liked taking things apart as a kid. I remember taking apart my mom's alarm clock. Then one time I took apart an old television. I didn't even know what I was looking at. I was 9 or 10. It was an old television that was in our basement, and I was like, "I wonder what this does?'" she recalled. "I just had curiosity. I like playing around with things, with my hands."
In high school, she watched her neighbor fix cars and learned how to do it herself.
"To this day, I can change my own oil," she says, "though I choose not to."
The 1981 Bedford High School graduate went to Cuyahoga Community College to pursue a career as an electrical technician. While a student, she worked part-time in the Tri-C Cooperative Education department, taking phone calls from prospective employers.
"NASA called and I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to do that one.' I had to post it on the bulletin board before I could apply for it, so I put it on the bulletin board and I went right back to my office and applied," she said.
She got the job as an instrumentation technician in the Research Instrumentation Branch. And she loved it.
Annie Easley, NASA math expert, in February, 1979. (Photo by Richard J. Misch)
Inspiration from an original NASA human computer in Cleveland
Then one day she met NASA pioneer Annie Easley, a NASA "computer" in the 1950s and '60s, like the women depicted in "Hidden Figures," though she was in Cleveland. Easley had been a technician and later went on to attain a degree in mathematics at Cleveland State University while working at NASA Glenn.
"I guess she was our version of a 'Hidden Figure' at Glenn Research Center. I had the opportunity to meet her and, to be honest, I was very happy being a technician. After I met he and found out she had her degree in mathematics, I told her, 'You know, I think I want to do that.' And she encouraged me to do it and to be honest, that's the one thing that pushed me over the edge to go back to school. Again, I was very happy being a technician, however, I knew that something else was in me, I just didn't know what. After talking to her, I found it."
She worked full time and traveled to Akron to attend mathematics classes at the University of Akron, eventually achieving her math degree in 2002. Now she works as an electrical engineer at NASA, performing analyses of electrical power systems on the International Space Station and Orion.
Encouraging young girls to pursue the sciences
Nowden, an avid skier who lives in Maple Heights, said she works hard to recruit young women and minorities into the field, but finds many are intimidated.
"I don't know if it's the wow factor of working at NASA, because I didn't know I would be working at NASA in my lifetime, either. Some people have that wow factor and they're like, 'I could never do that.' And that's not the case. That's what I try to tell people when I go out there. I don't care if you are black, white, male or female, you can be here just like I am," she says.
Despite knowing Easley, Nowden acknowledges she did not know the "Hidden Figures" story and came away inspired.
President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2015, in Washington. Johnson is one of the women featured in the Oscar-nominated film "Hidden Figures,'' and the book of the same name. Looking on, at right, is baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The film hits close to home
"A scene in the movie that actually hit me most was when Katherine Johnson wanted to get into the ops meeting and they said no women allowed. And her manager asked, 'Who is in charge of that meeting? Who says who can go in?' And she was like, 'Well you're the boss. You decide who goes in and you need to act like a boss.' When she said that, it hit me, I had one of those moments, like, yeah, been there, done that," she said. "And another thing that hit me is that as soon as she said it, she dropped her head and went back into that so called obedient mode. I really connected with that moment because I've had that moment."
The film, she said, is helping in the effort to diversify the STEM field.
"I have been recently told by several people at church or the bowling alley or wherever I go, 'My daughter is now considering the STEM field.' Or my cousin just informed me that her daughter decided, 'You know what? I'm going to be like my big cousin and become an engineer.' It's like all of a sudden, I'm hearing a lot of this," she said. "It makes me happy."
Nancy Hall, a fluid mechanics researcher at NASA Glenn, says in sixth grade she knew she wanted to be a scientist. The three small cameras mounted in front of her can shoot 4,000 frames per second. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)
Nancy Hall, 49, Aerospace Engineer, project manager
If you want to know more about Nancy Hall, about her path from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Florida Institute of Technology (the first in her family to go to college), from sci-fi geek to scientist, well, you'll have to wait. She's not interested right now in talking about how she was inspired as a child by the black female communications officer Lt. Uhura on "Star Trek," about the impact her sixth-grade science teacher had on her, or about how she applied to a bunch of NASA facilities when she graduated from college in 1990 and heard back first from NASA Lewis (Now NASA Glenn), where she's worked ever since.
Right now, she's interested in describing the machine being built in her lab that will test how fluid and gases react in space. And so, after her visitors don blue paper coats and pass over a sticky floor mat to avoid laboratory contamination, she offers a handshake and a "hello" and gets right into the science:
"What we're trying to understand is the behavior of liquid as it is flowing, as you are boiling it, and condensing it," she says. "Here on Earth, because of convection, you can have water run through a system and it can take heat away. But in microgravity, you don't have natural convection where hot air rises. You don't have that natural convection in space. So we need other mechanisms in order to get heat away from a surface. We've got an experiment here...."
Twenty minutes later, she's still going strong.
"If we can find a system that behaves the same on earth, on the moon, on Mars, then we have what is called gravity independence. We can design one system that works in all three places. That's what we're testing for. We're about to get into our critical design review. Our flight hardware is scheduled to fly in 2019," she says.
With Hall in charge as the project manager, there's no doubt it will be ready for launch.
"Overall, I'm in charge of the schedule, the budget and the technical aspect. If anything goes wrong, I'm the fall guy," she says.
Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrayed Lt. Uhura on the 1960s televesion series "Star Trek," speaks after the Space Shuttle Endeavour lands aboard a NASA Boeing 747, at the conclusion of its last flight at Los Angeles International Airport Friday, Sept. 21, 2012. In a few weeks Endeavour will be towed through city streets to its new home at the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
Inspiration from a Star Trek character
Hall was a smart kid attending Catholic school in Brooklyn. She credits a science teacher, along with "Star Trek," "Star Wars" and "Outer Limits," with inspiring her.
Lt. Uhura on "Star Trek" was a particular influence, she said. She notes that civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. once urged the African-American actress who played Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, to stay on the show when she considered leaving.
"That's how important she was to kids like me," she said.
A TV character and a teacher pushed her to science.
"I liked math and science. I would not say I was smart. Some things came easy and I was able to grasp the concepts," she said. "In sixth grade is when I decided I want to be a scientist. I had a sixth grade science teacher and she had hamsters, and chameleons and a fish tank and we did all kinds of experiments in her class and I just enjoyed learning why things do the things they did."
Decades into her career at NASA, she saw "Hidden Figures" and went right out to buy the book. She didn't know the details of what these pioneering women had done.
"I saw myself in the one lady kind of with the attitude, the one who fix the cars (Dorothy Vaughan). I was a tomboy and I loved doing stuff with my dad," she said. She also has the experience of studying and working often with men and often with white men.
"In college, I was the only girl in my calculus class. I think I may have been the only minority," she said.
She's never dwelled on it.
"I usually get along well with everyone so I usually never had issues. I was more focused on my studies and seeing the end goal than looking around at other people. My dad always said, 'You put your mind to it, you can do it. Do your best and you can get there,'" she said.
Finding your passion and pursuing it
She signed on with NASA right out of college and, while there, she pursued a master's degree in mechanical engineering with a focus on fluid mechanics from the University of Toledo. Hall is married to another NASA Glenn employee, Steve Hall, who works in communications. They have a daughter who is a senior in high school and is interested in becoming a cinematographer. That's fine with mom.
"Find something that is your passion," she said. "Don't listen to other people tell you what you can and cannot do I ask our spring interns and our summer high school students, what is it you like to do? What are you interested in? And I find engineers and scientists in that field to talk to them. If you want to be a forest ranger, you can't live in New York City. Find out what is involved and if you want to do it, nothing can hold you back."
Hall is heavily involved in Girl Scouts.
"I like doing stuff with my girls that's beyond what they would do. I show them how to launch model rockets," she said. "I tell them, 'One day, maybe you'll go to Mars. The kids we have in middle school right now, they will be the ones walking on Mars."
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