Astronauts relied on Nasa’s ‘hidden figure’ for her exceptional skills as a computer
‘‘I did not feel much discrimination, but then that’s me. I don’t wear my feelings on my shoulder.’’
Katherine Johnson mathematician b August 26, 1918 d February 24, 2020
When Katherine Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1953, she was classified as ‘‘subprofessional’’, not far outranking a secretary or janitor.
Hers was a labour not of scheduling or cleaning but rather of mathematics: using a slide rule or mechanical calculator in complex calculations to check the work of her superiors – engineers who, unlike her, were white and male.
Her title, poached by the technology that would soon make the services of many of her colleagues obsolete, was ‘‘computer’’.
Johnson, who has died aged
101, went on to develop equations that helped the NACA and its successor,
Nasa, send astronauts into orbit and, later, to the Moon.
In 26 signed reports for the space agency, and in many more papers that bore others’ signatures on her work, she codified mathematical principles that remain at the core of manned space travel.
She was not the first black woman to work as anasa mathematician, nor the first to write a research report for the agency, but she was eventually recognised as a pathbreaker for women and African-americans in the newly created field of spaceflight.
Like most backstage members of the space programme, she was overshadowed in the popular imagination by the life-risking astronauts whose flights she calculated, and to a lesser extent by the department heads under whom she served.
She did not command mainstream attention until President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the country’s highest civilian honour – in 2015. The next year, her research was celebrated in the best-selling book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly and the Oscar-nominated film adaptation.
Johnson was ‘‘critical to the success of the early US space programmes’’, Bill Barry, Nasa’s chief historian, said in a 2017. ‘‘She had a singular intellect, curiosity and skill set in mathematics that allowed her to make many contributions, each of which might be considered worthy of a single lifetime.’’
Amaths prodigy from West Virginia who said she ‘‘counted everything’’ as a child – ‘‘the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed’’ – Johnsonworked as a teacher before becoming a computer at the NACA. She was one of about 100 such staff, roughly a third of whom were black.
The movie Hidden Figures took occasional liberties with fact to emphasise the indignities of segregation. Johnson, played by Taraji Henson, is forced to run half amile to reach the ‘‘coloured’’ bathroom. In reality, Johnson said, she used the bathroom closest to her desk.
‘‘I did not feel much discrimination, but then that’s me,’’ she recalled in 1992. When she detected hints of racism, such as when a white colleague stood up to leave as soon as she sat down, she said, she tried not to respond. ‘‘I don’t wear my feelings on my shoulder. So I got along fine.’’
She spent her early career studying data from plane crashes to help devise air safety standards, at a time when Nasa’s focus was on aviation. Then, in October 1957, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik thrust the space race into full tilt.
One of rocket science’s most vexing challenges, they soon realised, was calculating flight trajectories to ensure that astronauts returned safely to Earth, splashing down in the ocean reasonably close to a navy vessel waiting to pluck them from the water.
Johnson’s findings, outlined in a 1960 paper, enabled engineers to determine exactly when to launch a spacecraft and when to begin its re-entry.
Her handwritten calculations were said to have been more trusted than those performed by microprocessors. A short time before John Glenn launched into space in 1962, he asked engineers to ‘‘get the girl to check the numbers’’.
‘‘All the women were called ‘the girls’,’’ said Barry, ‘‘and everyone knew exactly which girl he was talking about.’’ Johnson, who was then 43, spent a day and a half checking the trajectory calculations made by the IBM computer before giving the go-ahead to Glenn, who became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.
Katherine Coleman was born in West Virginia. She credited her proclivity for mathematics to her father, a farmer who had worked in the lumber industry and could quickly calculate the number of boards a tree could produce.
She studied at West Virginia State, a historically black college, with plans to major in French and English and become a teacher. Amathematics professor persuaded her to change fields.
She later recalled his saying: ‘‘You’d make a good research mathematician, and I’m going to see that you’re prepared.’’ She had never heard of the position before. ‘‘I said, ‘Where will I get a job?’ And he said, ‘That will be your problem.’ ’’
She first married James Goble, a chemistry teacher, who died of cancer in 1956. She married James Johnson, an army artillery officer, three years later.
When she was invited to move to Houston in the mid-1960s to help establishwhat is now the Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre, she declined the offer, to maintain her family’s ties in Virginia.
At Langley, where she retired in 1986, she performed calculations that determined the precise moment at which the Apollo lunar lander could leave the Moon’s surface to return to the command module, which remained in orbit high above. She also contributed to Nasa’s space shuttle and Earth satellite programmes.
After the release of Hidden Figures, she played down the importance of her role in the early years of the space programme. ‘‘There’s nothing to it – I was just doingmy job,’’ she said in 2017.
‘‘They needed information, and I had it, and it didn’t matter that I found it,’’ she said. ‘‘At the time, it was just a question and an answer.’’ – Washington Post