Trailblazing Woman: Katherine Johnson

KATHERINE JOHNSON (1918-2020)

Katherine Johnson was one of NASA’s human computers, performing the complex calculations that enabled humans to go to space and return home safely.

Katherine Johnson (née Coleman) was born in 1918 in West Virginia. She was a bright child with a gift for numbers and complete 8th grade by the time she was 10. She enrolled at West Virginia State College (now WVU) at 18, and graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French by the age of 18.

In the late 1930s, Johnson took a job teaching math and French at schools in Virginia and West Virginia. In 1952, she heard about open positions at the all-Black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s predecessor).

There, Johnson read the data from airplane’s black boxes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Just two weeks into her tenure in the office, she was assigned to a project in the Flight Research Division, where her knowledge of analytic geometry made her an asset to the all-male research team. She was given a permanent position shortly thereafter.

One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., had a safe trip. A year later she helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet, another American first. In 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11.

Johnson continued to serve as a key asset for NASA, helping to develop its Space Shuttle program and Earth Resources Satellite, until her retirement in 1986.

Katherine’s achievements became public knowledge when she was 97 years old, following the 2016 release for the movie Hidden Figures (based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly), which also won an Academy Award.

Johnson died at the age of 101.

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