The 2017 film Hidden Figures achieved remarkable success, receiving three Oscar nominations and one SAG Award for the best cast in a motion picture. This film explored the prominent work of three African-American mathematicians at NASA, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, and the person we will explore today, Katherine Johnson.
Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918. As a child, Johnson had a passion and a gift for numbers, beginning to attend high school at the age of 10. At 15, she enrolled at West Virginia State College, eventually graduating with the highest honors at the age of 18. After college, Katherine Johnson became a teacher and enrolled in the graduate math program at West Virginia University, becoming one of three African-American students to integrate into the school.
After teaching, Katherine Johnson heard about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) Langley laboratory. Johnson began work here in 1953, where she performed complex calculations needed for aeronautical research. After beginning work, she was soon assigned to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division where she spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests.
In May of 1961, she performed trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, and her most prominent work took place in 1962 on John Glenn’s orbital mission. At the time, NASA began to shift towards IBM computers to perform orbital computations; however, astronauts were cautious with machines executing the calculations that their lives depended on. Additionally, these machines would sometimes experience malfunctions, which only added to the astronaut’s worries. Prior to being launched into space, John Glenn personally requested that Johnson verify the calculations made by the machine to ensure his safety, which was significant at the time because Johnson was an African-American woman in a racially segregated nation. Ultimately, her calculations allowed John Glenn to become the first American to orbit Earth, which marked a turning point in the United States’ space race with the Soviet Union.
After this orbital mission, Johnson performed calculations for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon and eventually retired in 1987 after 33 years of work at NASA. At the age of 97 in 2015, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama before sadly passing away in 2020.
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