Parents need to know that “Hidden Figures” is based on the inspiring true story of three brilliant African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1950s and ’60s as “human computers” – making calculations and contributions that helped launch the manned spaceflight program. Dorothy Vaughn , Mary Jackson , and Katherine Johnson were engineers and computers at NASA at a time when both women and African Americans were still widely discriminated against, particularly in segregationist Virginia, where NASA’s Langley Research Center is based.