Alan Contessa (left) worked on the lunar module. Frances ‘Poppy’ Northcutt was a ‘computress’ for TRW Systems. Morgan Watson was a NASA engineer, John Wolfram (right) a Navy SEAL.

Over the next eight years, success depended upon people like Morgan Watson, a black man from the segregated schoolhouses of rural Louisiana; Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, a high-school valedictorian and onetime beauty contestant from the Texas oil patch; Alan Contessa, a working-class kid from New York City’s outer boroughs; and John Wolfram, a rebel with a patriotic streak from the Wisconsin countryside.