Author Q&A: Margot Lee Shetterly Reveals NASA's 'Hidden Figures'

More than a half century after the first NASA astronauts launched into space, one might think that there are no sweeping narratives left untold about the early years of the U.S. space program. But there was at least one history remaining to be written: that of the women, and in particular the African-American women, who worked as the "human computers" at NASA's original research laboratory and provided the calculations necessary for sending American spacecraft and astronauts into space and to th