Christine Darden: A Black College Student at NASA's Langley Research Centre

Christine Darden was a student at Hampton Institute and historically black college in the same town as NASA's Langley Research Centre. In just a few years, Christine would join the space programme but she wasn't their typical recruit. If you look at film footage from Pathé Newsreel of the preparation for John Glenn's mission in 1962, you see shots of white male astronauts and technicians. What few people knew at the time was that there were teams of highly educated women employed by NASA to do the calculations of the missions. The large proportion of them were African American.