"Why can’t these people ever simply enjoy an American success?"
. . . 4. CNN: “She endured obscene phone calls, had to use men’s bathrooms, as one of NASA’s first female engineers”Excerpt:During the historic launch of Apollo 11 which put the first men on the moon, rows of men in shirts and ties lined the consoles inside Kennedy Space Center.But one woman stood out — 28-year-old JoAnn Morgan.Morgan, who worked as an instrumentation controller for the mission, was the only woman allowed inside the firing room where NASA employees were locked during Apollo 11’s historic lift off on July 16, 1969.Morgan needed to be in the room to alert the test team if anything went wrong. But she had to get special permission to be there.
Chip Bok cartoon added by TD |
3. The Guardian: “‘Whitey’s on the moon’: why Apollo 11 looked so different to black America”Excerpt:The Apollo programme, motivated by the space race against the Soviet Union, cost $25.4bn, the equivalent of $180bn today; only the Vietnam war hit taxpayers harder. While Nasa warned Congress “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”, polls showed a majority of Americans opposed the “moondoggle”.The black press questioned how the price tag could be justified when millions of African Americans were still mired in poverty. Testifying to the US Senate on race and urban poverty in 1966, King had observed “in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon and with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slums on Earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence”.. . .