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‘Hidden Figures' girls' viral photo lands them a ticket to NASA

The students toured the Johnson Space Center
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HOUSTON- Outer space may seem out of reach to three inner city girls, but the opportunity to meet a real, live astronaut brings the cosmos closer.

A school project in which three Milwaukee College Prep students recreated the "Hidden Figures" movie poster became an internet sensation and their ticket to NASA.?

Jay Flores, a high school and college classmate of teacher Terrence Sims was just one of thousands who saw the viral post.

"This is one of the cutest awesome examples I have ever seen,” Flores said. “And we thought, let's take it next step, so I started tagging some of my friends that I knew worked at NASA. And pretty quickly they were able to make it happen."

From the moment they stepped off the bus at Johnson Space Center these fresh face kids received the VIP treatment. Zion Rogers and the other girls had the opportunity to see math and science in action.

"Math is my favorite subject,” Rogers said. “[I ] just like numbers, like sometimes I'm just thinking and numbers come to my head."

The students’ guides were engineers, flight directors and yes, astronauts, including Greg Johnson, who was a part of the Hubble mission.

At every turn their curious minds were opened to a new world of possibilities.

"Let me just say we have a shortage of pilots in America we have a really big shortage of girl pilots. This is a great job, I come to work happy to come to work everyday. This does not even feel like a job,” Johnson said.

This field trip has not only been about possibilities, as the girls got the opportunity to meet a game changer in NASA history.

Anna Lee Fisher—a pioneer—made the tough decision of leaving her 14-month-old baby girl here on Earth to become the first mom in orbit. She is a standout in the U.S. space program's first class of female astronauts.?

"Some of the women I still work with tell me they remember seeing us and they were an astronaut for halloween,” Fisher said. “When they were in kindergarten! And now they are my colleagues."

Fisher showed the girls the impossibly tight squeezes that define life in a space vehicle.?

The youngsters toured the hallowed halls of Houston mission control, where flight directors oversaw Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon nearly 50 years ago.
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By the end of their visit, these young scholars saw NASA change from a seemingly unattainable goal to something much more real.

"Now they see women that look just like them and their mothers doing this huge thing in this big utopia of NASA,  and they are right in the middle of everything, " Sims said.

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