Goofs

When Katherine's hands are briefly shown typing up a report (one of the many she was shown typing for Stafford), she is wearing an engagement ring on her left 4th finger months before she and Jim are engaged in the movie's plot sequence.

In the meeting at the Pentagon, Katherine is calculating John Glenn's splashdown coordinates on a chalkboard. At one point she's writing a number that has a "530" thousand figure in it, but she starts to miswrite it as "350," then immediately backs up to overwrite it as 530. When she backs away from the board, the figure is correct but doesn't show the overwrite she just made.

At the Mercury 7 press conference, when the astronauts are asked "Which one of you will be the first in space?", the astronauts all raise their hands. Glenn is shown raising both hands, then the camera angle changes, and he raises both hands again.

(at around 1h 38 mins) When the Friendship 7 capsule is seen, there is a lady completing the white pinstripe on the top left side of the down-stroke of the '7', but in the very next shot, a few seconds later, only the bottom section of the '7' and the horizontal bar have pinstripes.

When Katherine Goble finds her daughters fighting in their bedroom, she settles them down. After they climb into their own beds, the pajamas on the daughter in the middle are askew, then straightened out, then askew, then straightened out again.

In the movie, the impression is given that John Glenn's flight was to have lasted seven orbits and was curtailed after three orbits due to the problem with the heat shield. This is incorrect as the flight was always scheduled for three orbits. Where the confusion comes in, on reaching orbit Glenn was given a "go" for seven orbits meaning the systems, fuel, oxygen, etc. could sustain the astronaut for seven orbits IF needed.

The drama of John Glenn's malfunctioning heat shield was not followed in real time by the U.S. public as depicted to dramatic effect in the film. During the Mercury program, NASA was acutely aware of the public relations importance of the space program, and Mission Control staff were focused on dealing with the fault and not on feeding news releases promptly to the media while the problem was actively being resolved. Despite the 3-orbit / 7-orbit confusion, most if not all civilian Americans were unaware of the malfunction until long after Glenn had safely splashed down.

John Glenn's Friendship 7 is shown orbiting nose first, when in actuality the orientation was heat-shield first.

During re-entry, mission control refers to the capsule "entering the communications blackout zone". In fact, the communications blackout was discovered for the first time during the re-entry and was one of the more frightening parts of the final moments.

When Stafford is talking about the critical GO/NO GO calculations, he mentions either coming in to steeply and burning up or too shallow and skipping off into space. This was true of Apollo lunar re-entries, but Mercury was in Earth orbit and did not have enough speed to "skip off". If the angle was too shallow at re-entry, the Mercury would still re-enter, but it would land long.

In a key scene, Al Harrison, in Mercury Mission Control, sends Sam to find Katherine, in the West Computing Hall, and have her check some calculations. Sam runs to find her, and the two of them run back. West Computing Hall is part of NASA's Langley campus in Virginia. Mercury Mission Control is at the Cape Canaveral launch complex in Florida. In fact Al Harrison was not at mission control at the Cape. He was at Langley, speaking with John Glenn by phone.

The women are shown as commuting daily between Hampton, Virginia and Langley. Their commute was NASA Langley Research Center, located at Langley Air Force Base, which is located in Hampton. The name Langley sometimes leads to confusion with the part of McLean, Virginia known as Langley, which is nearly 200 miles North of Hampton.

Al Harrison takes an axe to the sign that says "Colored Ladies Room", after he learns that his lady calculator has to walk half a mile or so across the NASA campus in order to wee, because there is no such facility in the building where she works. His action is not a fight for racial equality but as a time-saving measure in a high-pressure environment.

But it is the wrong way around: he should be taking an axe to the sign that says "whites only" in his building. The sign he demolishes is still half-way across NASA, and he is not thinking about opening up a coloreds facility to whites.

When Mary Jackson responds to Karl Zielinski regarding the engineer's training program, the camera pulls back during the course of their discussion. In the foreground on the right is a film camera. In the middle at the bottom of the screen is woman's high heel shoe embedded in a grating. Looking closer, Mary Jackson is barefoot.

In a previous scene, Mary Jackson got the heel of one of her shoes stuck in the grating. She was unable to free it before the wind tunnel test started and had to remove the other shoe to get out in time.

The movie film camera is a prop. An actor can be seen dressed as one of the technicians tending to it. Film cameras normally were present during wind tunnel tests. Films of wind tunnel tests allowed engineers to review results later, without rerunning the tests, aided by the ability to run the films at slower speeds, and to back up and replay the film.

In Virginia, cars have always had both front and rear license plates. In the movie, the ladies' car had only a rear Virginia plate.

When failed, early rocket launches are shown, the footage is of another type of rocket exploding.

When the character Dorothy Vaughan is shown driving her 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan, the shift selector is in Park. This is a common error when showing through-the-windshield shots in movies and TV.

The 1957 Chevrolet that the women are driving has the prominent "V" chrome trim on both the hood and on the trunk. That means it is supposed to have a V-8 engine. When the ladies have car trouble in the beginning, they have the hood open, and the one-valve cover can be seen; the engine is clearly an in-line 6 cylinder.

It would seem that most all of the scenes involving vehicles were shot at one time with the same assortment of cars -- despite location -- appearing throughout the film, including a bright red Metropolitan sedan. Because these are all doubtless collector pieces leased for the film, all are in perfect, spotless condition, regardless of age. Further, a number -- including a blue '57 Thunderbird -- do not change position in the NASA parking lot despite shots being days, weeks, or months apart.

When Katherine is writing on the chalkboard in the Pentagon meeting she writes " 17,544 mph= 25,371 ft/sec" which is wrong. It is actually 25,731ft/sec.

The manual for the IBM 7090 computer has an incorrect logo for IBM. The dashed IBM logo was not introduced until 1972.

There are several scenes where television cameras are shown. Every one has a long silver Zoomar Zoom lens attached. In 1961, these did not exist yet. In fact, they were so rare at Kennedy's funeral in the fall of 1963 that all the cameras along the funeral procession had to share just two of these lenses, each being rushed from camera to camera as the procession advanced.

Speaking of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight, the TV announces the flight time in UTC ("Coordinated Universal Time", with international initials). However, UTC had barely been invented in 1961, and was not yet called UTC. In reality, the TASS news agency would have announced the time as Moscow time, or if intended for consumption in the English-speaking world, possibly "Greenwich Mean Time," the customary usage at the time. U.S. news media also likely would have reported it as the equivalent in Eastern Standard Time.

The Go/No Go calculation that features so prominently in the film takes place during the descent of Friendship 7, just before parachute deployment. It actually took place long before, when the retro-rockets were fired.

The IBM equipment to be installed (in 1961) is shown on pallets wrapped with stretch wrap. Stretch wrap was not used for this purpose before the 1970s.

When Dorothy Vaughan is caught using the 7090, there's a shot where one of the men goes over to the printer and looks at the output. The soundtrack is that of a dot-matrix printer, while the printer shown (the slower IBM 716) is a 150lpm typewheel printer, based on the IBM 407 accounting machine, which sounds completely different.

When Shepard's flight is shown in space, a small, receding earth is shown in the background. Alan Shepard's sub-orbital flight never got that far from earth.

As John Glenn is being driven to the launching pad of Friendship 7, his vehicle is escorted by two police cars. The lead escort vehicle is marked 'State Trooper' with the Seal of Virginia on it, and appears to be the same vehicle from the first scene, which would be out of place in Florida.

During the flights of both Alan Shepard (Freedom 7) and Gus Grissom (Liberty Bell 7) there is a large global tracking map shown. Neither of these flights went more than 200 miles from the cape.

When Katherine is writing John Glenn's splashes on the blackboard, the latitude figure is around 50 degrees North. This is the latitude of Southern England and northern Nova Scotia. Glenn would have landed much further south, around 25 degrees North.

The map of Africa in the main room includes the letters "Moçambique" and an accompanying black icon, as if depicting Moçambique (Mozambique) as a city, rather than a country,

The 3 women leave work for home in the 1957 Chevrolet after that day of work when they are given that police escort for arrival. The car starts up perfectly normal at the end of the day. No mention is made as to how the broken starter got fixed during the day as the starter was not in working order on arrival that morning at Langley.

When the IBM calculations fail and John Glenn asks Al Harrison to have the smart girl verify the data, Al tells Sam to go find Katherine Goble. Sam actually takes the data to her without being asked, instead of finding and bringing her.

Al Harrison knocks down a "Colored Ladies Room" sign. Yet it was stated that the nearest one is a 20 minute walk away from their lab. It is unlikely that all of his Engineers and staff would have been there. It would have made more sense if he were knocking down a "Whites Only Ladies Room" sign.

At about the middle of the movie a TV reporter states, "It's a historic day here at Cape Canaveral. Alan Shepard and Freedom 7 will be launched into space at an altitude of about 116 miles an hour." The actor misspoke. The statement should have been, "... at an altitude of about 116 miles." (Actually, most historical accounts list an altitude of "115" - but that would be quibbling.)

In assessing John Glenn's return, Katherine insists that the orbit should be a parabola. A parabolic orbit would accelerate the capsule to escape velocity, making it depart from the Earth, not return.

When Mary Jackson went to court to get permission to go to the all white school, the judge admonished her "only the NIGHT classes". It made no sense to say that. She was working full time, the classes were at night. Plus, she was an adult. An adult would not want or need to go to a class during the day at a high school.

When Mary says Katherine needs to learn how to dance, and proceeds to teach her, Katherine is leading. She should be learning in the following position for when she dances with a man.