Assertion Supported
NASA placed male math grads in engineering and females in support
“Why is it that the men coming here with the same background I had, degrees in mathematics or applied mathematics, Were put in engineering sections and able to work on their own projects and write their own papers, and the females are put into computer sections…”
Insight
Profitable commercial supersonic flight requires overland routes
“The lesson actually became if you're really gonna have a profitable supersonic airplane, it really needs to have some overland roots.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
U.S. companies must hire overseas due to domestic engineering shortages
“We need all of the engineers that are in school now who are not taking those math and science courses, those who have the capability to be engineers to keep our country ahead, to fill the jobs in this country that all of these companies need, and they're havin…”
Assertion Supported
NASA engineering sections had no female supervisors in the late 1960s
“There were no women supervisors to say, maybe in human resources in some of those offices, but in the engineering sections, the women were typically the secretaries or the computers that were supporting some of the groups.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Male engineers educated alongside women had better attitudes at NASA
“As I was there longer, and you began to see the young engineers come in who had been in school with women in engineering, their attitude was entirely different over working with women.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dr. Darden went five years without promotion before NASA engineering transfer
“And I got transferred to an engineering section. I got a promotion because I hadn't had a promotion in five years. And in that riff list, I was actually being bumped by somebody hired at the same time who had gotten promoted twice.”
Assertion Supported
1960s supersonic flight tests caused property damage in Chicago and Oklahoma
“Flight test in the sixties around Chicago and around Oklahoma City, people were calling saying, you know, you broke my glass, you cracked my sheetrock, so they could get paid for the damage to their houses and things.”
Assertion Supported
NASA validated sonic boom reduction theory using modified F-5 flight tests
“We got two F-Fives from the military, and we took just volume and changed the volume of the area distribution of the airplane just using volume of the F-Five, and then we flew a second F-Five with no changes. We flew them out at Dryden Research Center down nea…”
Assertion Supported
NASA evolved from few women engineers to having female center directors
“Well, by the time I left, we had seen far more women coming into the, coming to the system, and though we had had, in the intermediate times, we had had some female supervisors that had difficulty managing men who did not particularly like to work for women, b…”
What-if
Early Black female NASA hires' success enabled subsequent hiring
“If NASA had hired black females and they had not done the job well, they probably would have stopped hiring them.”
Insight
Math and science skills double career options during technological disruption
“If you've got the background of the math and science, you have doubled the number of options in which you're able, possibly could get a job in. If you have, don't have that background, you are, have eliminated a lot of jobs.”
Opinion
The US needs a major space mission to rally national focus
“I think we need to be able to do that, and just like getting to the moon kind of got this country focused on one thing years ago, I think getting to Either Mars, or the asteroids, or whatever it be. I think we need something like that to garner us again, to ma…”
Assertion Supported
NASA chose airframe design over active wave disruption for sonic boom reduction
“There were several options of how to do this over the years. Different, different inventors would come up with different ways of doing it, and I believe that the consensus was most of them actually Took more energy and more effort to try to do what was being d…”
Assertion Supported
NASA human computers solved equations without knowing their context or meaning
“I was in a support role, that the engineers would bring in equations. We were to solve the equations and give them the answers, and very often we didn't know what the equations were for in the first place, nor what the answers meant.”
Assertion Partly supported
US banned commercial overland supersonic flight following 1960s tests
“And it was that during that time that this country actually passed a law that there could be no commercial supersonic flight over land.”
Assertion Contradicted
Only 13 Concorde supersonic airliners were ever built due to route limits
“Because they had, didn't have people buying very many Concords, they only built 13 of them, and so it did not make money.”
Insight
Visible role models are essential for inspiring students to pursue careers
“Well, you know, maybe I'm thinking that folks didn't realize that, that what black women were working on at the time, so they were work, we were working on some pretty important topics, and I think that's part of what is galvanizing, and as far as our schools,…”
Insight
Workers must continuously adapt skills to avoid technological displacement
“Computers are coming in. They're going to replace these human computers who are very much slower. So she says, I think you better learn how to do Fortran so that you can actually run the computer and not be out of a job. And that's something that is happening …”
Insight
Early-career professionals should proactively seek work rather than waiting
“Why don't you walk down that hall, and just kind of look at the reports, and see if you see one that interests you, and read it, and then go to the author, and say, I just read your report, and I'm really interested in this work, and I'd like to know so and so…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
NASA employees historically spent entire careers in one technical domain
“And so we find that actually most of the people that would come to NASA, once they started working in the engine area or the hypersonic engine area, they spent their careers working in that area.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
High school teacher, not Sputnik, inspired Dr. Darden's math career
“Well not necessarily the Sputnik. I happened to have a geometry teacher that just made me fall in love with geometry and math. And so that sort of sealed the deal that I wanted to go toward the math and physical sciences rather than biological sciences, and th…”
Dr. Christine Darden