; (8) human computers played an integral role during World War II; (9) between 1941 and 1945, employee numbers at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory increased from 940 to 3,220; (10) during the 1940s, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory began recruiting African-American women with college degrees to work as computers who were grouped in a segregated section of the laboratory known as the West Area Computers ; (11) despite having degrees, all African-American computers were required to take a course in chemistry at Hampton Institute before starting as computers at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory; (12) the first African-American computers did the same work as their White counterparts, but in a period during which segregation was policy across the South and in the armed services, African-American computers encountered segregated dining and bathroom facilities and barriers to other professional jobs; (13) Katherine Johnson joined the West Area Computers in 1953, and would go on to join the Space Task Force in 1958, at which she calculated trajectories for the spaceflights of Alan Shepard and John Glenn and synched the lunar lander of Project Apollo with the moon-orbiting command and service module; (14) Dorothy Vaughan served as the head of the segregated West Area Computing Unit at NACA from 1949 until 1958; (15) Mary Winston Jackson spent 2 years working the computing pool at NACA before working for engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki in the 4-foot by 4-foot supersonic pressure tunnel; (16) in 1958, Mary Winston Jackson became the first African-American engineer at NASA; (17) in 1967, Christine Darden began working as a human computer at NASA; (18) frustrated by her lack of promotion after 5 years of computing and programming, Christine Darden was transferred to sonic boom research where she would go on to spend 25 years working on sonic boom minimization before being appointed as the director in the Program Management Office of the Aerospace Performing Center in 1999