NASA Langley in pop culture

During the Christmas holidays in 2010, Hampton native Margot Lee Shetterly and her husband found themselves driving across some of the bridges named in honor of the Mercury astronauts who had trained at NASA Langley Research Center a half-century earlier.

This led to a dinnertime conversation about some of the older women whom Shetterly knew from the neighborhood — women who used to work at NASA Langley.

"My dad was talking about these women," she said. "(He said), 'They did some amazing work and, oh by the way, you know, Ms. Johnson calculated the launch window for the astronauts.' Really casually, like everybody just wakes up in the morning and calculates the launch window for astronauts."

On the way home that night, Shetterly and her husband talked with fascination about the work that had been done by these women. Why had they never heard this before? Amid all that has been written about the space program, why hadn't this story been told?

Speaking to students six years later at her alma mater, Phoebus High School, Shetterly said: "It was a moment of, 'You know what? This is important. I need to pay attention to know what happened.' It's not good enough for me to take these women and their work — 'Oh, they worked at NASA, no big deal' — for granted. ... So I got really curious, and once I got curious, I had to know the beginning of the story."

That story became "Hidden Figures," Shetterly's best-selling book about the African-American women who worked as "human computers" at NASA Langley in the early days of the space program. That book was subsequently adapted into a 2016 film that earned three Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture.

That film, a feel-good hit that grossed more than $160 million at the U.S. box office, marked the first time many Americans had ever heard of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton. And the filmmakers went to great lengths for authenticity, asking the center's current staff to send along volumes of archived photos so that everything from the work spaces to the parking lots would look just like NASA Langley at that time.

The film, set in the 1960s, concludes with a current photo of Katherine Johnson, one of the mathematicians at the center of the story. Johnson, then 98 years old, made an appearance on stage at the Academy Awards, receiving a standing ovation.

The pop culture and entertainment worlds have not always been so observant in depicting the work done at Langley.

Take, for example, "The Right Stuff." Tom Wolfe's critically acclaimed book, which contrasts the marketing of the Mercury 7 astronauts with the obscurity of the early test pilots, makes repeated references to the training John Glenn, Gordon Cooper and their friends did in Hampton.

For example: "The seven of them were stationed at Langley Air Force Base in the Tidewater section of Virginia on the James River, about 150 miles due south of Washington. Langley had been the experimental facility of the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and was now the headquarters of NASA's Space Task Group for Project Mercury. Every morning they could count on seeing John Glenn, up early, out on the grounds, in the middle of everything, where no one could miss him, doing his roadwork."

Or: "Many was the steaming encephalitic summertime Saturday night at Langley when some NASA engineer would start knocking back that good, sweet Virginia ABC store bourbon on the patio and letting his ego out for a little romp, like a growling red dog."

But when that book was adapted into a 1983 film, which won four Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture, there was no room in its three-hour running time for a single scene set at Langley.

Perhaps that helps to explain Chris Kraft's initial disdain for the movie. Kraft, a Phoebus native and a NASA Langley legend, was one of the key figures in the entire U.S. space program.

"I saw that movie when it was first shown here, with the astronauts," he said from his home in Houston. "I thought it was terrible. Then I saw it again 20 years later and I thought it was pretty damn good."

Ultimately, Kraft's response might simply be illustrative of the old advice to never see a movie about your own occupation. Too much inside knowledge leads to nit-picking the details that are immaterial to the rest of the audience.

Kraft acknowledges that when he first saw "The Right Stuff," he wanted less human drama and more about the technical aspects of the Mercury program. When he saw it a second time, with the passage of a couple decades to provide some perspective, he was able to appreciate the storytelling and the acting.

He had a similar reaction to "Apollo 13," which admittedly had far less to do with NASA Langley than "The Right Stuff." Once again, he found it overly dramatic compared to his own first-hand recollections of that nerve-wracking episode in Houston.

"But it grew on me," Kraft said. "To tell you the truth, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen on space."

Academy Award-winning director Damien Chazelle is working on a film version of "First Man," James R. Hansen's biography of Neil Armstrong. The book covers many details of Armstrong's training at NASA Langley. "To make the simulated (lunar) landings more authentic, the Langley designers filled the base of the huge ... structure with dirt and modeled it to resemble the moon's surface. Often testing at night, they erected floodlights at the proper angles to simulate lunar light and installed a black screen at the far end of the gantry to mimic the airless lunar 'sky.' "

A word search of an early version of the movie's screenplay showed no reference to Langley or Virginia.

Lily Koppel's 2013 book "The Astronaut Wives Club" told the story of the Earth-bound families of the Mercury program, many of whom lived in Hampton. Koppel describes visits to Fort Monroe and other locations around Hampton Roads. In a 2015 interview with the Daily Press, Koppel called these women "America's first reality stars," and said their time in Hampton reflected "their Cinderella transformation" in preparation for their spousal duties as media figures.

When the book was adapted into a 10-part miniseries for ABC, many scenes did take place in Hampton — though they were actually shot on sound stages in New Orleans designed to look like Langley Air Force Base.

Through all of the depictions of NASA Langley, all of the stories that have been written and told, it is Katherine Johnson — hidden no longer — who emerged as the unlikely pop culture star. She even has a Lego figure honoring her.

But her favorite moment of the entire process may have come in 2015, when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.

"It was very nice," she said a year later, a grin crossing her face. "I also got to be kissed by the president. That was as exciting as getting the medal."

Holtzclaw can be reached by phone at 757-928-6479.

You can buy copies of the book, The Unknown and Impossible on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can listen to the podcast here.