Katherine Johnson
Katherine grew up in the southern United States at a time when racial segregation was commonplace and opportunities for African Americans were in short supply. In 1952, Katherine learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was looking to hire mathematicians. At first she was assigned to the group of black women ‘computers’ who did the number-crunching to analyse data gathered from NACA’s research aircraft. Her particular talent was soon recognised, however, with a temporary posting within an all-male, allwhite team at the Flight Research Division that became permanent.
After the surprise launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957, chaotic early US attempts to play ‘catch up’ culminated in a wholesale reorganisation of NACA to form the nucleus of the current NASA. Racial and gender segregation were done away with, while the Flight Research Division was renamed the Space Task Group and was charged with putting American astronauts into orbit ahead of the Soviets. Katharine was therefore in the right place at the right time to play a key role in the early US space effort. As well as working on Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 suborbital flight in 1961, she co-authored work on the precise placement of satellites in particular orbits and the relationship between a spacecraft’s re-entry point and its landing site.
Despite machine-based calculation fast becoming the norm at NASA, the early ‘Mercury 7’ astronauts were reluctant to put their lives entirely in the hands of technology, and John Glenn famously asked for Katherine to manually recheck the calculations before the launch of his Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first US orbital mission.
Johnson continued to work at NASA until her retirement in 1986. She considered her proudest achievement to be the calculations needed to sync the Apollo Lunar Module with the orbiting Command Module. She also helped devise a method of ‘navigation by the stars’ that allowed the astronauts of the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft to time the precise engine burn needed to return them safely to Earth. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama, while the following year, her story, along with those of other black American women at Langley, was chronicled in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures.