Hidden Figures, with Margot Lee Shetterly and Janelle Monáe

Discover more about NASA’s “Hidden Figures” as Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with author Margot Lee Shetterly, Janelle Monáe, comic co-host Sasheer Zamata, NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry, NASA systems engineer Tracy Drain, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/hidden-figures-with-margot-lee-shetterly-and-janelle-monae/ Photo Credit: Brandon Royal

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're going to explore the story of NASA's Hidden Figures. These are the unsung mathematicians whose calculations helped put the first Americans into space. So let's do this.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my comedic co-host tonight is comedian Sasheer Zamata. Sasheer, welcome.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And on the subject of tonight, I have some knowledge of NASA's history. I wouldn't call myself an expert, we brought in an expert. We brought in Chief Historian of NASA, Bill Berry. Bill, thanks for joining us on StarTalk. So, to begin this conversation, I have the trailer for the film Hidden Figures, just to get a basic idea of what that film is about. Check it out.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  We go from being our fathers' daughters, to our husbands' wives, to our babies' mothers.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  You know what we're doing here?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Trying to put a man into space.

• 1:29Bill Nye?

  There is no protocol for women attending.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  There's no protocol for men circling the earth either, sir. I plan on being an engineer at NASA, no matter what it takes.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  We all get there together, we don't get there at all.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  My gals are ready.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, you're the Chief Historian for NASA, and you advise on this film?

• 1:56Speaker 04

  I did.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I gotta ask, did Hollywood get it right?

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Oh, definitely. Ted Melphy, the director of the movie, he was a fanatic about trying to get as much of the history as exactly correct as he could, so...

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you always gotta give him a little latitude to, you know, because it's Hollywood? But you want the basics to at least be correct.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, the big thing that happens in most movies, because, you know, it's not a documentary, it's a Hollywood movie. And the big issue is usually time compression, and that's what they did in this one as well. The movie takes place in 1961, '62.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  John Glenn's launch, so Yuri Gagarin was 61, John Glenn was 62 in response.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, but what the movie covers is things that happened from the mid 40s to about the mid 1960s. So there's some compression of things that happened there, so it's for dramatic effect. But, you know, I'm very happy with the work they did and I'm really glad the movie's in the can now because now I don't have to answer all of Ted's questions on an hourly basis.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  How long was that process? Like, when did you get involved with the movie?

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Early in 2016, then they filmed in the spring of 2016 in Atlanta. So from about February through March or April, we were on the hook, me and many of my colleagues at NASA, answering amazing numbers of questions, finding pictures of things that they wanted pictures of.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so they had to care about this enough to even make your job worthwhile? Because they could have just ignored everything and then it would have just been a piece of fluff.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had some disagreements about some things where Ted said, "This is a movie and I know how to make a movie." And he was clearly right about that. And so we disagreed on a couple of things where I said, "Yeah, that wouldn't really happen." The wind tunnel scene is the key one.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, yeah, that's... Her heel's stuck in the... seconds before they turn on the wind tunnel?

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I told Ted, "Ted, people don't walk to their job through a wind tunnel." Anybody who works at NASA knows, you don't walk through a wind tunnel. And he goes, "Well, okay, so Bill, how many people in America know about this? How many people work at NASA?" I go, "About 18,000." He goes, "Okay, so 18,000 people will go, 'That's not a good thing.'" He said, "I guarantee you, all the millions of other people who watch the movie are gonna think this is a great scene."

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 18,000 is nothing compared to millions of viewers.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  I wouldn't have known.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was right.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so actually, so this film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly by the same title, Hidden Figures, and she actually stopped by my office recently. And I asked her for some backstory on these female mathematicians and how they got into the aeronautics industry. So let's check out the clip.

• 4:43Speaker 06

  So during World War II, and we always hear about Rosie the Riveter and the women going into

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Redefining.

• 4:49Speaker 06

  The factories.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Redefining women.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  Redefining women's work. Well, this is the same thing that happened with the mathematicians.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know this.

• 4:55Speaker 06

  You know, all of a sudden, there was a huge demand for aircraft research and development. You know, in the 1940s, America's at war, you know, allied versus the Axis powers, supremacy of the sky, and who is going to do the hard work of the mathematical calculations necessary to make the planes faster, safer, more efficient?

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, it's the boys who are flying the plane.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  It is, it was the boys.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now you have an intellectual gap. If some of them would have been the guys, and now all the guys are at war, now you have women.

• 5:29Speaker 06

  Or even the engineers who were doing this work, who were also called off to war.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  And all of a sudden, it's like, wow, well, maybe we can give these women a chance. Maybe they can do this work.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe there are some smart women out there.

• 5:40Speaker 06

  Maybe there's some smart women.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably not, but let's give it a chance.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  Well, let's give it a chance.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do we have to lose?

• 5:45Speaker 06

  And then all of a sudden, these, you know, these former schoolteachers come in.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 06

  And became computers, mathematicians, and junior engineers. But it turned out they were really good at it. They proved themselves pretty quickly. And when it was obvious that not only could they do the work, they could also be hired at less, lower annual salaries than men, well, that made a whole lot of sense. And then all of a sudden, 1942, when we're really at war.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It made a warped kind of sense.

• 6:13Speaker 06

  It made a warped, yeah. You know, it made a warped kind of sense.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A sense in a warped world. It makes complete sense.

• 6:18Speaker 06

  Exactly, right. It was a rational decision on the part of the bean counters.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 06

  And all of a sudden, there were hundreds of women doing this work. Professional mathematicians.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I get it that you can attract women into it.

• 6:32Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's still the 40s and 50s, where, you know, darker-skinned people were not in the presence of opportunity, how do you get this community of African-American women rising up in the middle of this?

• 6:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and remember, and this was also in the South, in the Jim Crow South, in Virginia.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Add that to it. I don't even know how, that had to be impossible.

• 6:59Speaker 06

  1943.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you're lying. You made up the whole book.

• 7:02Speaker 06

  Well, you know, fortunately for us, this is true. This is all true.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's actually true.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just curious, Bill, this movie was set in the Jim Crow South. And NASA has centers all across the country, 10 of them, I guess is the number. North and south, east and west. What was NASA's relationship to that era, to the Jim Crow South era?

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Well, the movie takes place during the NASA period, but the pre-story happens during World War II. Right, so 1942.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pre-NASA.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Pre-NASA, so this is the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Fortunately, pretty close acronym, NACA. And so it just happened to be in Hampton, Virginia. And that was a part of the country where segregation was not only a policy, but it was a law.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if that was a law for the municipalities, but NASA is a federal, NACA is a federal agency. So are you still beholden to local laws if you set up shop in a Jim Crow county?

• 8:14Speaker 04

  I'm not sure there's a legal answer to that question. But in general, when NACA was set up and when Langley was set up, it absorbed the local culture. And over time, that became more of an issue as the country shifted during World War II. And those tensions came out and things started to change.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these three women featured in Hidden Figures. Were they on your radar at the time? We have Katherine Johnson.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are actual people.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Yes, they are.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So she calculated launch trajectories for the first, for John Glenn in orbit.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have Dorothy Vaughn, first black manager at NASA. And so that was?

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Octavia Spencer.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Octavia Spencer's character. And Mary Jackson, first black female NASA engineer. So were they on your radar in the NASA history books?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Katherine Johnson in particular because she was, she was a phenomenon. In addition to being a beautiful person to start with, but she was just mathematically a phenomenon. And it's interesting that when Ted Melphy came to us asking for pictures, I want the pictures of these people at work. So Ted, you know NASA photographers don't walk around taking pictures of people at work.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  You know, they do for some particular thing and purpose, but they don't like come by my office to take my picture while I'm sitting at my desk. But we started looking and there were actually a bunch of pictures of Katherine Johnson. And so that tells me that people at the time knew that she was something special.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an interesting fact.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that alone is evidence of this.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, the other two Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, very hard to find. We had some pictures of Mary Jackson. Dorothy Vaughn didn't ever like to have her picture taken. So there was one, precisely one US government picture with Dorothy Vaughn in the picture and she's on the side of the frame kind of leaning away from the camera.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the actress that plays Mary Jackson in the movie is Grammy nominated singer Janelle Monae. Well, she came by my office as well. My office, that's the place.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  That's the hangout.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anybody who's anybody come by my office. I asked her what she thought when she first read the script for the film. Let's check it out.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  I thought it was fictional. I was like, wow, somebody is finally in my mind. Somebody is finally going to portray African-American women in a different light. We're not going to just be celebrated for our beauty, but for our brilliance. And I was excited and once I was told that these women in fact did exist and they were directly responsible for getting our astronauts into space, some of our first Americans into space, I was, I was, I was hurt because as an African-American woman, I'd never heard of Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughn, Katherine Johnson. Truly, these are American heroes.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And I didn't know about this, so it became a personal responsibility for me to stop whatever it was that I was doing and to help celebrate these women who I feel have gone far too long without the acknowledgement that they deserve.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guess those, those half moon earrings?

• 11:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was cool. She's very spacey in her own way.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's got, she's got a little bit of geek, geek underbelly there.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, why, why did it take so long to acknowledge these women?

• 11:41Speaker 04

  I think there are probably a couple of reasons why that's the case. Most of these women began their work in the 40s. The first, you know, women computers there, the African-American women computers started in the 1940s. And what they were doing was largely classified work. They were told not to talk about what they were doing outside the home. So they naturally didn't do that. All these people were from the World War II generation. So that's sort of the second reason there, you know? They defeated fascism, you know, doing a little calculation, not such a big deal maybe they figured. But the, the third reason, and I don't really have a lot of data on this, but I think the third reason might actually be to some extent the environment of fear that might have surrounded these people. I mean, these were African-American women who had really good paying government jobs.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  You know, Dorothy Vaughn was making $850 a year as a teacher when, the year before she got hired by the NACA. She was making $2,000 a year when she came to work for the NACA. Good paying jobs. They probably didn't want to draw a lot of attention to themselves in that kind of environment. So I think some of it was a little caution on their part.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. So I asked Janelle Monae in my office with her moon earrings about taking on the role of Mary Jackson, who would become NASA's first black female engineer. Let's check it out.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Mary Jackson was a different. She was a different woman during that era. A lot of the women, with all due respect, because of, of them seeing their brothers and sisters being lynched by the way they looked at white people or spoke to white people, were very afraid to speak their minds. And Mary Jackson was not. She was not going to sit back idly and allow anybody to discriminate against her because of her race, her gender, or her class. And for me, it was just important to have this fearless woman

• 13:37Speaker 01

  who chose freedom over fear. Every day she walked into NASA and who was fighting for justice, not just for herself, but for the other women, to let them know that...

• 13:52Speaker 01

  We have the power to change or poke a hole in the matrix. And that's what she did. You know, it's either when these people walked in and they knew, okay, our goal is to get a man in space. They had to put aside their race, their gender. And we either do it all together, or we don't do it at all.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just end the show right now. I know, that's great. How am I gonna add to that? I can't. Bill, where would NASA be today if it did not sort of reach in and tap the full American workforce?

• 14:31Speaker 04

  I think we'd have been in big trouble. It was a team effort. It has been a team effort throughout NASA's history to do all these things. It's really, space is hard. We've been flying people in space for 60-odd years now, but it's still rocket science. And it's...

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a matter of fact, it is rocket science.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Literally rocket science. And it's not easy. So we need the most talented people, and the scientific evidence is clear that a diverse workforce, particularly when you're doing the things that have never been done before. A diverse workforce is really important. So NASA puts a really high premium on trying to attract as many...

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, there are programs in place to reach for everybody?

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Absolutely. One of the reasons we were so interested in the movie Hidden Figures and why NASA wasn't happy to be involved in a movie was we saw it as a way to inspire young people today to follow that path and prepare themselves for a future where they could be part of NASA.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, I'll do it.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, coming up, we'll take your questions about the math and science behind America's great space race when StarTalk returns.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We are talking about NASA's Hidden Figures, a group of black female mathematicians who were pivotal in American space race. And I asked Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shatterly about women who worked as human computers in the aeronautics industry, not only during the Second World War, but after. Let's check it out. Tell me about this whole concept of a human computer.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Computer as a noun that applies to a human being.

• 16:24Speaker 06

  It did, yeah. And it's easy for us to think now, well, a computer is on our desktop. We plug it in, or it's our phone. It was just, a computer was a job title. It's like someone who computes, and it was usually a woman.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like typist?

• 16:37Speaker 06

  Like a typist.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Computer.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, trucker, someone who drives a truck, you know? This was, that was their professional job title. And it was a very important job, not always easy, tedious, eye-straining, but it had to be done right.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise?

• 16:55Speaker 06

  Otherwise, well...

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The plane crashes.

• 16:56Speaker 06

  The plane crashes, you know? The spacecraft does not go in the right direction.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's follow that through. Rosie the Riveter, after the war, was sent back home. An entire ad campaign to get women back in the kitchen.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  Reconversion.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And out of the factories.

• 17:16Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the returning soldiers wanted their jobs back.

• 17:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so this didn't happen, so much it seems, with the female computers after the war.

• 17:28Speaker 06

  It didn't happen that much.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 17:30Speaker 06

  They had a cutback. Well, I think it's because aeronautics was still booming, you know? So we won the war.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The war, but the whole industry was birthed.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  It was, it was, we, you know, we won the war. You know, the Allied powers won the war. And a lot of that was because of airplanes, you know? And it was like, okay, we've won the war. What are we gonna do next? We're gonna fly faster than the speed of sound. 1947, you know? So right out of the war, it was like, okay, supersonic flight, you know? And then after that, everything. And then it was about the Cold War and the Soviets and the Korean War. And all of that was with airplanes and beating the Soviet planes. And then in 1957, we had Sputnik. So we've got like this whole series of things in which women... Doing these calculations and these computations were needed to help America achieve the next step on the space ladder.

• 18:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it took it took the threat of dying to say, okay, we need anybody who can help us, no matter your skin color. I would have preferred it happened, gee, this is the right thing to do. But no, that's asking too much, probably, particularly in the day.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  I think, I think that's a great question. I mean, is it possible for us to have technological expansion, opening of the workplace without having a defense threat?

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Is it possible?

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 18:50Speaker 06

  I don't, I'm not sure, but it hasn't been possible.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Bill, would you agree it takes a national security threat to, to spawn that kind of advancement we saw during the space race?

• 19:06Speaker 04

  You know, a national security threat opens up spending on, an investment on, on research of all sorts, and it also sort of loosens up the boundaries on lots of other things. So I think, you know, progress happens faster during those periods.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When people don't want to die.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a, that's a strong motivator.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so let's just relive some of the history of this. So the Russians, 1957, fly Sputnik. And by some accounts, it was just, oh, it's just a, it's just a satellite. And then you realize it was a hollowed-out ballistic missile shell with a little radio transmitter. And so we needed to one-up them on this. So in the day, how important were these human computers to NASA, politically and militaristically?

• 19:56Speaker 04

  They were essential. I mean, you know, you had to have people doing the computing work to get the job done. And so, you know, could we have beaten the Russians to the moon in the 1960s without, you know, Catherine Johnson? Or, yeah, could we have, you know, beaten them with one arm tied behind our back? Probably, maybe, eventually, but we certainly wouldn't have beat the Soviets to the moon in the 1960s.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're doing all these calculations by hand.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, they did. The women computers were always extraordinary people. I mean, these are people with, with the math skills that certainly boggle my mind. And so

• 20:31Speaker 04

  You know, do we still have people like that? You know, a small cohort of people that could do that sort of thing? I think probably we can, we find, NASA still employs people who do that sort of work. Not manual computing anymore, but, but, you know, writing the computer programs and making sure they work properly. So that's an important part of the job.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that brings us to Cosmic Queries! Yes!

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We took questions from our fanbase about math and science behind the space race of the 1950s and 1960s. So what do you have?

• 21:01Speaker 05

  All right. From Frank Kane of Orlando, Florida. What was the balance between human and computer navigation in the Apollo era?

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good question.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Actually, the first contract for the Apollo program was for the guidance computer for the Apollo spacecraft, because they knew that was going to be the hardest thing to develop. And so, during the Apollo era, most of the navigation was done by computer on the ground, there were computers on the ground that did navigation work, and also the guidance computer.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so they don't miss the moon.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's kind of important not to miss the moon. Or Earth when you're coming back.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  But if you shoot for the moon and you miss, you hit the stars.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I heard that one.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  All right, next question. @PDruck1977 from Twitter says, "If you take away the modern computers, how would today's physicists manage alongside the 50s physicists?"

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can give you my outlook on that. I think I am the youngest person to have been formally trained on a slide rule. Because the year I learned how to do a slide rule, how to operate a slide rule, was the same year the four-function calculator dropped in price from $200 to $30. And the next month, we abandoned slide rules.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm formally trained in them, but anyone younger than I am is not. So if this is an apocalyptic fact, and you take away all computers today, I think everyone's hope, they would, they would, they'd look at a slide rule and wouldn't know what to do with it.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  I wouldn't know how to tip.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we, they, I think your people back in the 50s and 60s would dance circles around us today.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I think so. I was, my class at the Air Force Academy was the first class to be issued calculators instead of slide rules.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Uh, so that's 1975.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's about when that was, yeah, yeah. Are we the same age?

• 23:00Speaker 04

  I just rolled over the big six oh.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, six oh, yeah, yeah, okay. Gee, I get that.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. We got that one.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  Next one.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Abe Froman from Facebook asks, "What part of the moon landing was the hardest to calculate?"

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I don't know.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Ooh. Hmm. What part was the hardest to calculate?

• 23:24Speaker 05

  Where to put the lights? Ha ha, just kidding. I'm just saying, I was saying that they're recording it from, because it's from the studio, because it's fake.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Oh, please, please don't say that.

• 23:36Speaker 05

  I'm just kidding!

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She can say, she's a comedian, she can say anything.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  But, but I'll tell you, we, we post things on the NASA history, Facebook and Twitter account, and every time we post something about the Apollo landings, a picture, we get the trolls come out and talk about how it never really happened.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know what planet they were.

• 23:55Speaker 05

  I know it's real.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  I believe.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's not authorized to comment further on that fact.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  So, so, back to the question, the hardest part to calculate, I, I think, um, one of the issues, and maybe Neil, you'd understand this more than I would, uh, the moon is not an even gravitational field, so there's mass concentrations, uh, on the moon, and so it was hard to tell, uh, where they actually were trajectory-wise as they were going on the moon. It wasn't until we had a better map of the, the, uh, gravity field of the moon that we actually know better, so.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  I think that's, I think that's through some of the landings, particularly the first one.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great point, because if, if the moon is like, heaviest in the middle and gets lighter as you get to the surface typically, that's how that works, then the gravity field around it is perfectly symmetric. But if there's a mass concentration a little off-center, then the orbit feels that, and your orbit then does not take a perfect shape around, and you, and if you want to know where they are versus where they should be, uh, yeah, you gotta know. Excellent, excellent point. All right.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Paul Disberg from Instagram asks: "When they arrived at the moon, were the actions of the astronauts solely political?" parentheses planting the flag, "or did they do scientific research as well?"

• 25:09Speaker 04

  The first things they did were science. The first thing-

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, first they planted the flag. They did that before they did science.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  They scooped up- The first thing they did was they scooped up a sample of dirt-

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Wait, they did that before they planted the flag? I didn't see that. The first thing they did was step. Okay. They took a step.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And say a few things. Right, right, okay.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  Neil said a few words and then they walked around and they handed off equipment and did some stuff and then they put the flag up eventually, that's true. And they had a- And on the first one, they had a talk with President Nixon that was, you know, symbolic.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Nixon said, "The most expensive phone call ever placed", if I remember correctly.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  But the astronauts on the moon largely did- You know, they were there to do scientific work and so there was a very long checklist of things they had to crank through. And as we stayed longer on the moon on later missions, that list got longer and longer and they eventually had to give them a car to get driving around so they could find things on the last three missions, so.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like Jerry Seinfeld's reaction to that. He says, "This is typical guy behavior." "They take a rocket to the moon, but they still want a car to drive around."

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Why that?

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How American can you get? And my favorite experiment they did on the moon in the first mission was to lay down little- Mirror reflectors, corner reflectors they're called, that will beam back a laser that you send from Earth and you time that laser beam and you can get to very high precision the distance to the moon. And upon doing so, we learned what we had suspected, that the moon is spiraling away from Earth at about two inches a year. And one day, we will no longer have total solar eclipses because the size of the moon will not be large enough to cover the sun.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  That experiment is still in use.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still in use. Oh, yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  Who- so there's a laser that goes from here to the moon?

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. We got-

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  We got lasers.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got lasers.

• 27:08Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lasers, we got that.

• 27:09Speaker 06

  Alright. Do you have one now?

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't divulge that fact. No, we got lasers. If we got anything, we got lasers.

• 27:18Speaker 06

  Cool.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, coming up, Bill Nye the Science Guy, good friend of mine, shares his thoughts on the pioneers of America's next space frontier. Let's start talking from there.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Start off from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We are talking about the role of women in the American space race. And I asked the author of Hidden Figures about what it must have been like being a female professional in the 1940s and 1950s, and how the women featured in her book dealt with that reality. Check it out.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go back in time and just tell it like it was. So, smart women became schoolteachers, or possibly nurses.

• 28:12Speaker 06

  Possibly nurses.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, what could you be? A secretary, a nurse, a schoolteacher? I might have left one out.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And that's kinda it.

• 28:20Speaker 06

  That was it.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're fully educated.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  Right, for the middle-class professions, that was basically it.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, of course, right, right, right. Alright, so now, when you're a schoolteacher, you are a schoolteacher until?

• 28:31Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, until you get married.

• 28:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until you get married. Then you're no longer a schoolteacher.

• 28:35Speaker 06

  And then you are asked to tender your resignation.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are a baby maker in the kitchen,

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  possibly barefoot.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Barefoot, alright. So, were these women married?

• 28:46Speaker 06

  Uh, they were married. They were married teachers. They did have children, they did.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yet they stayed.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  Yet they stayed.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's really important information. Bill.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why were these women an exception to the traditional role of women in the workplace?

• 29:06Speaker 04

  I think the main reason was that computing was always women's work. You think back to the computers who worked for astronomers.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we had that early back in the turn of the century.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  And it was generally work that the guys didn't want to do, so they gave it to the women.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The menial work.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And in fact, we have an interesting memo from 1942, where the company asked the NACA about the computing pool, what they thought about it. And the NACA folks who wrote back said, "It's really great because the women get about twice as much work done as the men, and they're much more accurate, and we don't have to pay them as much."

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Oh, that's in a memo?

• 29:40Speaker 04

  That's in a memo, yeah.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, wow, okay.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  So during the war, they were able to bring women in to fill in men's jobs, but they were short of computers too, and there weren't more women with math degrees. And so, 1943, the door finally opens up and they say, "These smart black women who are teachers, who know math, let's bring some of them in." So that happens during the war. Then after the war, high-speed research, the flying supersonic and the space race, all that stuff is a high priority. You still need these women to do the computing, and they have a particular job skill. So, and a good computer was worth their weight in gold. You wanted to keep those folks around. So, all these strange things happened. The typical rules for women after World War II were,

• 30:25Speaker 04

  you know, you get pregnant, or you get married, you gotta leave, you get pregnant, forget it, and if you have kids, we don't want you. Right? Not true for computers. Computers get married, they keep coming to work. Computers, they get pregnant. There's actually some evidence that we found in the archives of supervisors turning a blind eye to very pregnant computers and ignoring that until the very last minute, when they actually had to let them go have their babies. Right? But then they had their babies, and many of them would come back. You know, they wanted to come back to the NACA and be a computer again? Come on back. They got their jobs back because they were so highly prized for those particular skills and their ability to, you know, do those calculations.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it would have been particularly rare, because back in 1950, our data show that about 30% of women worked outside of the home compared with more than 50% today.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. They're really an anomaly in a lot of ways, yeah.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  During the space race, they're doing things that has never been done before. They have to think outside the box, the proverbial box. So, do you think that culture... Is fundamentally more open to different kinds of people participating in it?

• 31:31Speaker 04

  I think so. That's one of the nice things about working at NASA is that it's an engineering culture. NASA is an organization where someone says, "Show me the data." Everybody's like, "Yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense to me." And people are willing to follow the data wherever it goes. And if this is clearly what the answer is, if what matters is how you perform and not how you look, then that's the data and let's go with it.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and of course, in the old days, all the astronauts were sort of military pilot types and all the same skin color. What is the NASA profile today of the astronauts' class?

• 32:06Speaker 04

  Well, in fact, we just hired a brand-new astronaut class this summer.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard about that. A lot of press surrounding that.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, but people are really excited about it. It's a very mixed group. The first classes, first class of astronauts that was not just all white guys was the class of '78, which is the first group.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shuttle.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  The first shuttle.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  The decision to use military pilots was actually an interesting one. Back in the 50s, when NASA was first thinking about hiring astronauts, they were originally going to advertise for circus performers and mountain climbers and they had this long list of professions.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People who get shot out of cannons, this kind of thing.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, seriously. And then the question came up, "Well, how are we going to be able to insure these people? And do you want to get security clearances on them?" And there was always difficulties. And they went to President Eisenhower over Christmas time in 1958 and said, "Well, you know, this is what we're going to do to advertise for astronauts." And he said, "What, are you crazy?" He says, "We can solve all that. We just get some military guys and bring them over because they already have security clearances. They'll do what we tell them to do and they're used to these kind of..."

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you don't even pay them very much.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  And we're not to pay them very much, exactly.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  I still want to see a circus person go to space.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the astronaut corps looks very much like America. How about the rest of NASA? Does that follow suit as well?

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've got about 18,000 people work at NASA and about a third of them are women.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so regarding the modern-day workforce at NASA, we have someone joining this conversation. We have NASA engineer Tracy Drain. Tracy, right now, are you live on our video call? Oh, there you go, Tracy.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Tracy, what do you do for NASA?

• 33:52Speaker 07

  I am currently a systems engineer and right now I'm the deputy chief engineer for the Juno mission which arrived at Jupiter last July.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love me some Juno missions. So I bet I am not alone in asking you this very basic question. What is a systems engineer?

• 34:09Speaker 07

  That's right. When you think about something that is complicated like a car, you might have people who focus specifically on how to build the engines or how to build the chassis and etc. Just like with spacecraft, we have telecom and propulsion and thermal. A systems engineer is someone who's not an expert in any one of those systems, but works with all of the experts to ensure that what we're developing, the thing that's going to work all together as a whole.

• 34:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so if the whole thing breaks, it's your fault?

• 34:39Speaker 07

  That's exactly right.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, everything's got to work together.

• 34:44Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, okay. And so, that's cool. What, uh, no, this might be like picking your favorite child, but what is your favorite mission that you've worked on? Or what's the coolest thing you've done in your career so far?

• 34:57Speaker 07

  I might get into a little bit of trouble for this one since I've been on Juno for the longest time in my career, but I have to say that my heart still belongs with Kepler, which discovered so many exoplanets and has just changed our whole understanding of the nature of planets in our galaxy and in the universe. And I'm actually about to transition onto a mission called Psyche, which is going to go visit one of the more interesting asteroids in our solar system. So I'm slowly working my way around the solar system in my career.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, very good. Well, thank you Tracy for joining us on StarTalk. All right.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So, up next, more on the hidden history of the mathematicians that put the first Americans in space when StarTalk returns.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're featuring my interview with Margot Lee Shatterly, author of the bestselling book, Hidden Figures. It's a story about pushing the boundaries of what we can accomplish as humans in a divided country. And the unity found in the pursuit of having pushed those boundaries. And I asked Margot how a group of black women in Jim Crow South could become heroes of the space race. Check it out.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  Before the civil rights movement meant Martin Luther King in the 1960s, there was a guy named A. Philip Randolph, labor leader, the largest black labor union in the country. And he said to then-President Roosevelt, "Open these war jobs to Negroes."

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tear down this wall.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  Tear down this wall. "We want to participate in the bounty of these war jobs." I mean, we were coming out of the Depression.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Roosevelt was very labor supportive in his politics and in his philosophies.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  And, and...

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's like the right guy to bring this message to.

• 36:59Speaker 06

  Well, and it took a little bit of a, you know, maybe a little more than that because A. Philip Randolph said, "If you do not open these jobs, we're going to convene 100,000 Negroes in the national capital, Washington DC." Which maybe wasn't something that Roosevelt wanted so much to happen. Particularly as the country's on the eve of war. And so, instead of doing that, they came to an agreement and Roosevelt passed Executive Order 8802, desegregating the federal government and opening these jobs to African-Americans, but also Mexican-Americans, Jewish-Americans, essentially prohibiting discrimination on the part of the federal government and the defense industry.

• 37:42Speaker 06

  Two years later, five black women walked through the door at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. And so they had a white computing pool and they had a black computing pool. And everybody knew, it wasn't called the white pool and the black pool, it's called the east pool and the west pool. Everybody knew that the west pool was the pool with the black women. But they also had colored bathrooms and they had a colored cafeteria. And, you know, their path ended at the moon.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a great line. Pat ended at the moon. Could you just put some context around this period for what NASA was doing?

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Sure, well, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, to give it its full name at the time, now the NASA Langley.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Langley was an aeronautic pioneer at the turn of the century, if I remember correctly.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  An unsuccessful one.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  But his successor at the Smithsonian picked the name.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  So that's how it wound up being Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He wasn't the one who figured out how to fly?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  No.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  There's a really great story about that, but, so...

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That apparently you're not gonna tell.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  Well, you know, the Wright brothers learned how to fly. Langley made two attempts to fly his aerodrome with a pilot onboard, and both of them failed. He launched it off a houseboat in the Potomac, and both of them crashed. And the last one was about two weeks before.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two weeks before the Wright brothers successfully flew.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  He'd gotten a lot of money from the government to do this. The Department of War had asked him to build an airplane. So, you wind up with Langley not succeeding, the Wright brothers talking about how they succeeded, and Langley winds up actually dying a broken man a couple of years later.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  His successor at the Smithsonian, a guy by the name of Walcott, Langley was the head of the Smithsonian at the time, Walcott winds up being the guy who's in charge of the Executive Committee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and when the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics decides to build a laboratory, he decides that we're gonna name it after my former boss, who probably would've flown first if those Wright brothers hadn't gotten away.

• 39:48Speaker 05

  That was a funny story, it's sad.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said it was a funny story.

• 39:53Speaker 05

  Died a broken man.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  It is sad, interesting. A lot of people that worked at Langley would wonder why it wasn't called the Wright Research Center.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, my friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy, has some thoughts on what the space frontier ought to look like. Let's check it out.

• 40:09Bill Nye?

  Greetings Neil. We're here at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the west side of New York, New York. During the space race astronauts like John Glenn would go streaking above the Earth's atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour in little aluminum cans like this one. There was a lot of mathematics involved and the people who did the figuring were often women who were virtually hidden in the workforce because of their ancestry. Consider the following: after you light a rocket engine and the fuel starts burning, with every moment that goes by, the rocket weighs less. So how much fuel do you start with? How high will it go? Where will it land?

• 40:52Bill Nye?

  Someone has to figure these things out. It's rocket science my friends and the problems don't care who solves them. But those problems were solved by the hidden figures of the space race. Back to you Neil.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, choosing imagination over fear just to find America's place in space. When StarTalk returns.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview with actress and singer Janelle Monae, one of the stars of the Oscar nominated film Hidden Figures. And Janelle plays one of the female mathematicians that helped launch the first Americans into orbit. And she says she's a nerd in real life too. I love it. Check it out.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  I just want everyone to know that I am a proud geek. I'm a proud nerd.

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Card carrier.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  I'm constantly learning. I think that it's important to be around smarter geeks. You start looking at things differently and your ideas and the collision of ideas creates the sonic boom. So telling the story about these three women who did this, knowing that there were women who were geeks and they were beautiful and they could be both is so inspiring. And so I just hope that people know that you just, you can be a cool, creative geek and change the world.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So NASA is kind of famous for geek culture, I think.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. Of course, Langley Research Center is 100 years old this year, and they're our mother center, as we've referred to them, the first center of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and then the other ones grew from there. 10 centers, lots of exciting stuff going on at NASA. Every one of those centers, there are people doing exciting work, just like we have astronauts 250 miles above us right now at the International Space Station doing research.

• 43:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you saying, geeks are spread around the whole country?

• 43:06Speaker 04

  We're all over the place.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I asked Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shutterly what key lessons she would have us learn from this story. Let's check it out.

• 43:18Speaker 06

  Never let fear get the best of imagination and curiosity. You know, I mean, it takes tremendous imagination to send someone to the moon. I mean, this ball of light in the sky, and we're gonna send somebody all the way there and put them in this little tuna can and put them on a candle and send them out.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not a candle, a bomb.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  A bomb, a bomb.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Controlled bomb.

• 43:40Speaker 06

  You know, we're gonna send them, shoot them out there. I mean, that takes a hell of a lot of imagination to, and then we're gonna bring them back safely. We're not just gonna let them leave, we're going to bring them back.

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It takes gonads.

• 43:51Speaker 06

  It really does. It takes imagination to...

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, gonads, do you see what I did there? That's the gender-neutral way.

• 43:57Speaker 06

  Very good. Very modern.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, see?

• 44:01Speaker 06

  You know, and it takes a lot of imagination to say, well, any of us can do any of these things. You can be a woman, a black woman, and do math. You know, that you could look at anyone, any of us, and say, well, you know, let me imagine what that person might be.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but then there's a place where the rubber hits the road, and that's access to opportunity.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  It is.

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's where the perseverance matters.

• 44:22Speaker 06

  The perseverance is another thing. And really, you know, and one of the things that I think speaks to that, you know, that Catherine Johnson, when you ask her, well, listen, you were a black woman in the segregated South telling your boss that you could do the math to send the man into space and get him back safely.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That man, that military man.

• 44:40Speaker 06

  That military man, that like, clean-cut, buzz-cut, you know, all-American guy.

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  And, you know, meanwhile, there's the segregated bathroom and the segregated cafeteria. You're a woman, you know, what, how did you know how to do that? And she says, you know what? It goes back to something my dad told me when I was little. And he said, listen, he said this to all of his children, "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you." And, you know, if we live in an environment where we're always afraid of the future and we're always afraid of each other and we're, you know, we're just paralyzed by fear, well, there is, there will be no progress. You know, we, we have to let our imagination and our curiosity triumph over fear. You know, I think ultimately that's what the space race was about.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  That's what these women were all about. You know, allow curiosity and allow imagination, our better, the better parts of our nature to triumph over fear.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Bill, how would you summarize the legacy of the women featured in this, in Hidden Figures?

• 45:50Speaker 04

  I think that when, when we're at our best, you know, when we're doing our best work, we were looking at excellence and inclusion to get all the best talent onto the work that needed to be done. And I think that the case of these, these women in particular shows what you, what the benefit is of doing that. And, you know, as NASA historian, I could say that the verdict of our, our history is clear. It's not, not the package that you come in, it's the performance you bring to the job that makes the difference.

• 46:24Speaker 05

  And just showing representation to people will inspire other people to keep doing these kinds of things. Like, I think this movie, Hidden Figures, is huge for people to know that these are women that existed and that they could do the same thing.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I think of a workforce doing whatever, I don't care. You can ask, who comprises that workforce? Is it one demographic, one skin color, one gender, one religion? And you realize, we created these tribal boundaries among us.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am this group, you are that group. We will do this, you will do that.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as a scientist, I'm thinking, what's going on?

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science doesn't care what religion you are, what skin color you are, what gender you are. The value of pi is the same on this side of the earth as it is on the other side of the earth as it is across the universe and across time. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that it was science and science's cousin, engineering, that brought people together.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People that laws had them separated, not only by skin color but by gender.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science knows no color boundaries. It is not only international, it is universal.

• 48:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a cosmic perspective.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, keep looking up!