It was progressive, he says, and populated with scientists and engineers from all over the country who cared more about hard data than societal constructs. “Langley was an unusual place,” says Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian. Still, Langley not only recognized the expertise of these women and offered them jobs based solely on their abilities but trusted them with the astronauts' lives.
When Johnson started calculating celestial trajectories, the civil rights movement was still gaining momentum, and the group of female computers Vaughan led was sequestered in a room with a sign outside that read “Colored Computers.” The next year, Johnson calculated and plotted the path astronaut John Glenn would take when he showed a restless, anxious country that it, too, could send a person into orbit and meet the Soviet challenge.Īfter circling the Earth three times, Glenn safely splashed down-but he reportedly was not willing to even begin his journey until Johnson had verified the calculations produced by a new breed of robotic computer (her computations matched the machine’s, and the rest is history). In 1961, Johnson calculated and plotted the trajectory Alan Shepard’s space capsule would follow as it briefly left Earth. (Also see “25 Years on, Collapse of Soviet Union Still Brings Cheers-And Tears.”) Also among them was Mary Jackson, who would go on to become the first female African-American engineer employed by NASA.Īfter just two weeks, Johnson was transferred to the Flight Research Division, where she and her colleagues were eventually tasked with helping NASA meet the challenge posed by the Soviets with the 1957 launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite, followed by the 1961 orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. Johnson applied for a job as a computer at Langley and went to work under the direction of Dorothy Vaughan, the first African-American woman to supervise the center’s cadre of human calculators. In aeronautics labs around the country, these jobs were often filled by women. Mechanical computers were just beginning to emerge in research labs, so to perform complex calculations, most teams primarily relied on skilled people who were nimble-minded and facile with numbers. Then, in 1953, a small group of "human computers” at Langley Research Center in Virginia came calling. “You could be a nurse or a teacher,” she said in a video interview with MAKERS. With limited options, Johnson initially took a job teaching math, French, and music at Virginia public schools, since that was, she said, the obvious thing to do with her talents.
KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA GENEALOGY MOVIE
That brilliance, which is chronicled in a recent book and the upcoming movie Hidden Figures, would eventually help the United States win the space race, a geopolitical competition that peaked with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.īut in the first half of the 20th century, Johnson was penned in by stereotypes about her race and her gender, as well as Jim Crow laws that mandated the segregation of African-Americans. By 18, she’d finished college, where she excelled as a math major and was sometimes the only student in the hardest courses offered. Johnson started high school by the time she was 10. She counted everything: the steps between her house and the road, the number of dishes she’d washed-anything that could be quantified. As a girl growing up in rural West Virginia, Katherine Johnson loved to count.
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