🇺🇸Katherine
Johnson

When John Glenn was preparing to become the first American to orbit the Earth in February 1962, NASA had just installed electronic computers to handle the trajectory calculations. Glenn refused to fly until a specific person had checked the numbers by hand. The person he asked for was Katherine Johnson — a Black woman working in a segregated section of the Langley Research Center in Virginia, whom Glenn apparently trusted more than the machines. She verified the numbers. The mission proceeded. Glenn completed three orbits and splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean. The story is almost too perfectly emblematic of Katherine Johnson's career: decades of essential, invisible work, done with a precision that the most sophisticated technology of the age could not exceed, performed by a person whom the era's social arrangements had designed to keep invisible.

Katherine Coleman was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest of four children of Joshua Coleman, a farmer and handyman, and Joylette Coleman, a teacher. She showed an early and pronounced aptitude for mathematics — she was reportedly counting everything around her almost as soon as she could walk — and her father, determined that his children receive a proper education in a state that provided no public high school for Black students in their county, moved the family one hundred miles to Institute, West Virginia, to be near West Virginia State College. Katherine entered the college at fifteen, in 1933, majoring in mathematics and French. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937 at age eighteen, having taken every mathematics course the college offered and persuaded a professor to create a new graduate course in analytic geometry specifically for her.

She taught school in Virginia for several years, then in 1953 was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — which became NASA in 1958 — as one of a group of Black women mathematicians assigned to the West Area Computing Unit at Langley. These women were known as "computers" — the human predecessors to the electronic machines that would eventually replace them. They worked in a segregated facility, used separate bathrooms and cafeteria facilities, and were rarely credited by name in the reports their calculations made possible. Johnson was assigned to the Flight Mechanics Branch and proved so capable that she was kept there permanently, becoming the first woman in the Flight Research Division to be credited as a co-author on a research report.

Her specific expertise was orbital mechanics — the mathematics of how objects move through space under the influence of gravity. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 suborbital flight, the first American human spaceflight. She calculated John Glenn's 1962 orbital trajectory and manually verified the electronic computer's outputs at his personal request. She worked on the calculations for the Apollo program throughout the 1960s, including the trajectory analysis for Apollo 11 — the mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in July 1969 — and she contributed crucially to the Apollo 13 rescue in 1970, helping calculate the procedures that brought the damaged spacecraft safely back to Earth. She also worked on the space shuttle program and early planning for the Mars mission before retiring in 1986 after thirty-three years of service.

She remained largely unknown to the general public until 2015, when NASA named a building at the Langley Research Center in her honor and President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The following year, Margot Lee Shetterly published Hidden Figures, a book about Johnson and her colleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan; the film adaptation, released in December 2016, became one of the highest-grossing films of that year and introduced Johnson — played by Taraji P. Henson — to a global audience. Katherine Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of one hundred and one. She had lived to see herself recognized as one of the essential mathematical minds of the space age, the woman whose numbers were precise enough that an astronaut trusted them over the machines, and whose brain helped put human beings on the surface of another world.