Hidden Figures

[Dalhousie]

Who has seen this film?  Any thoughts on it?

[Ranb]

I watched it; was okay.  Many details changed from the book.  I made a comparison of the book and movie here; http://www.thatwasnotinthebook.com/diff/hidden-figures  Typical style over substance.

Ranb

[Obviousman]

Good movie but there are inaccurate / compressed timelines, composite people, etc. I'd recommend you go see it but be prepared to cringe a little.

[Zakalwe]

It was OK entertainment. It was not a documentary or even historically accurate. It was, however, a decent enough movie that deal some of the issues of segregation and had some space stuff in there.

Worth a watch, but don't go if you get hot under the collar about inaccuracies. It's entertainment (jazz hands  ), nothing more.

[Dalhousie]

I thought it was excellent, a good story well told, showing the banal nastiness and idiocy of segregation.  It was also good to see the story of the behind the scenes people in the Apollo project.  It took more technical liberties than I expected. But no more than "The Right Stuff".  I'd recommend it to everyone and will definitely watch it again.

[Ranb]

It was more about race relations than the space program which is just fine.  I thought some stuff was rather cringe-worthy such as the description of orbital mechanics to educated engineers instead of one of the women explaining it in the same basic way to her children.  Or the heat shield on the side of the spacecraft instead of the bottom. 

Not sure why the script was changed so much from the book.  There were many interesting anecdotes that would have been entertaining to see on the big screen. 

[Dalhousie]

It was more about race relations than the space program which is just fine.  I thought some stuff was rather cringe-worthy such as the description of orbital mechanics to educated engineers instead of one of the women explaining it in the same basic way to her children.

It was probably for the audience.  Which was a mistake, because other complex concepts have been well explained in movies before - wormholes in "Interstellar" or ballistics in "October Sky"

Or the heat shield on the side of the spacecraft instead of the bottom.  [/quote]

That was odd.

Not sure why the script was changed so much from the book.  There were many interesting anecdotes that would have been entertaining to see on the big screen.

So much to tell, so little time to tell it in.
[/quote]

[ka9q]

"The Right Stuff" certainly had its cringe-worthy moments, especially the broad stereotypes of German rocket engineers. ("Just....do it in ze suit!")

But I just realized I had tossed it into the same mental hash bucket as Michener's "Space", which was considerably worse. I gagged when Michael York's parody of von Braun has a "Eureka!" moment when he suddenly invents the concept of rocket staging out of whole cloth to a dumbstruck room of fellow rocket scientists. The idea was already at least 500 years old by that time, and the theoretical details had already been extensively worked out by Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth, among others.

[Ranb]

"The Right Stuff" certainly had its cringe-worthy moments, especially the broad stereotypes of German rocket engineers. ("Just....do it in ze suit!")

How about, "Our Germans are better than their Germans"?

[bknight]

"The Right Stuff" certainly had its cringe-worthy moments, especially the broad stereotypes of German rocket engineers. ("Just....do it in ze suit!")

How about, "Our Germans are better than their Germans"?

My memory was of Glenn "complaining about "only" 3 orbits, which was the original plan for the mission.

[Dalhousie]

"The Right Stuff" certainly had its cringe-worthy moments, especially the broad stereotypes of German rocket engineers. ("Just....do it in ze suit!")

How about, "Our Germans are better than their Germans"?

My memory was of Glenn "complaining about "only" 3 orbits, which was the original plan for the mission.

That's quite a common perception, even I shared it for many years.  Comes from the"You have a go—at least seven orbits." comment. Hidden Figures repeats it.

[Dalhousie]

"The Right Stuff" certainly had its cringe-worthy moments, especially the broad stereotypes of German rocket engineers. ("Just....do it in ze suit!")

How about, "Our Germans are better than their Germans"?

Wasn't it the other way round?

[Obviousman]

Reminds me of the old joke:

"Under capitalism, Man exploits Man. Under communism, it is the other way round."

[Kiwi]

While browsing my digital copies of Space News Roundup a few days ago, I found this obituary for one of Langley's female Computers:

Space News Roundup,  1 May 1963, page 4-A
Obituary

Texie Belle Miller, former Langley Research Center employee and wife of Jules M. Miller, Research Staff Office, died March 24 in Dixie Hospital after an illness of 3 weeks.

Born February 21, 1921 in Boykin, she received a A.B. Degree in Mathematics from Longwood College in 1942 and joined the Center staff on July 1, 1942 as an assistant computer in the Full Scale Tunnel. She transferred to East Computers on May 21, 1945 and resigned October 1, 1946.

In addition to her husband she is survived by three sons, John Malcolm, Jerald Felts and Warren Scott.

What does the AB in "A.B. Degree in Mathematics" stands for?

Also, has anyone ever heard of a source of originals of the newsletters that could be contacted online for clarification? When the reports of Mercury missions were published, a portrait of the astronaut was printed lightly among the text on the first page, but the online copies are strictly black and white, so parts of the portraits obscure text. Such as (see the last line):

Space News Roundup, Vol. 2, No. 16, 29 May 1963, page 1
Cooper wraps up one-day flight during MA-9
Project Mercury does it again; pin-point splashdown despite last-minute difficulties

A host of last-minute hitches in otherwise smooth operations failed to keep Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper from his appointed rounds, May 15. He made 22 of them, spent a day and a half in space, calmly accepted the failure of his electrical system late in the flight, and brought Faith 7 down by hand a mile closer to the prime recovery ship than did his predecessor, Astronaut Walter Schirra.

When it was all over, he summed it up in two words "[obscured] great."

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/roundups/roundups.htm

[Dalhousie]

What does the AB in "A.B. Degree in Mathematics" stands for?

Artium Baccalaureus that's a arts batchelor/batchelor of arts for us peasants