Hidden Figures: Young Readers Edition

Double V is a concept that African American people developed referring to the double victories of winning World War II and winning equality for Black people in the United States. African Americans felt like the United States could not fight for the freedom of people in other countries if its own citizens at home were not equal. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson embodied the idea of the double V as their work helped support the war effort and paved the way for greater equality in the African American community.

NACA was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a federal agency founded in 1915. NACA built a laboratory and research facility in Hampton, Virginia, where teams studied and researched flight. It is the setting for much of the biography.

In 1958, NACA was renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA. With this change, the agency focused its attention on the study and research of space travel. The computers in the biography work through this change.

Orbit refers to the curved path that an object takes moving around a planet, moon, or star. Some of the first manned space missions involved sending an astronaut into space to orbit the Earth. This involved lots of difficult math to calculate the exact path the spacecraft would take in its orbit and how it would return to Earth; Katherine does much of this math in the biography.

Supersonic means faster than the speed of sound. For much of her career at Langley, Mary Jackson specialized in supersonic airplanes, doing the calculations to make planes that could go faster and faster.

Trajectory is another name for an object’s path when it moves. One of Katherine Jackson’s most important jobs was calculating the trajectories of different space missions. This means that she was responsible for determining the exact path that the spacecraft would take going into space and returning.