The groundbreaking NASA mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson of the fame of “Hidden Figures” was always at the front of the class.
The iconic ‘human computer’, born August 26, 1918 in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, began teaching at the age of 13 on the campus of historic Black West Virginia State College.
There, Johnson finds a mentor in William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, a professor who became the third African-American ever to earn a doctorate in mathematics.
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The bright, young student earned bachelor’s degrees in both mathematics and French and began teaching both subjects at a black public school in Virginia.
In 1939, Johnson was hand-picked by West Virginia State President John W. Davis as one of three black students integrating at West Virginia University, where she enrolled in the graduate mathematics program.
However, Johnson decided to leave early to start a family with her first husband, James Goble. They had three daughters together.
In 1952, after returning to education, a relative told Johnson about public positions in the Black West Area Computing Division of the National Aviation Advisory Committee (NACA) at Langley Laboratory.
Johnson began working at the then segregated Langley in the summer of 1953. Two weeks later, Dorothy Vaughan, fellow West Virginia and program director, assigned Johnson to a project in the Maneuver Loads division of the Aviation Research Division.
The math genius will spend the next four years in aviation, analyzing data from flight tests and investigating a plane crash caused by waking turbulence.
Goble died of cancer in December 1956. The following year, the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, which sparked the space war.
In 1958, Johnson provided part of the mathematics for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology – according to the scientific journal Nature – the first comprehensive reference document of the space agency, and engineers from the compendium form the core of the Space Task Group .
It was NACA’s first official step in spaceflight before being incorporated into what is now known as NASA.
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In 1959, Johnson married the decorated Navy and Army officer James A. Johnson.
In the 1960s, Johnson continued the development of her career by co-authoring Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placement of a Satellite over a Selected Earth’s Position – a report outlining the comparisons that a orbital plane described in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. .
It was the first time a woman in the Aviation Research Division had been recognized as the author of a research report.
Johnson also worked on trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7 – America’s first human spaceflight.
In perhaps her best-known achievement, in 1962 she was tasked with checking the orbital equations that manually control the trajectory of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission as part of the pre-flight checklist.
While the mission required the construction of a global communications network that connected tracking stations worldwide to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Bermuda and Cape Canaveral, Florida, astronauts were careful to put their lives in the hands of the machines, which often would function.
On July 20, 1969, NASA Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins landed on the moon – a mission for which Johnson also performed instrumental calculations.
She was also invaluable during the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, which helped provide backup procedures that ensured the crew’s safe return.
During her tenure, Johnson wrote a total of 26 research reports and co-authored them. She retired in 1986 after 33 years at Langley.
She mentions the work on the calculations that helped synchronize Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-rotating Command and Service Module, the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (more recently known as Landsat), among her greatest achievements.
In 2015, at the age of 97, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the presidential medal of freedom.
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In 2016, Johnson’s story was shared in the feature film “Hidden Figures” and Margot Lee Shetterly’s book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.”
Three years later, Johnson tells her own story in a book for young readers called ‘Reaching for the Moon’.
NASA also named a building, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, after it and the SS Katherine Johnson spacecraft were launched to the International Space Station in February.
Johnson passed away on February 24, 2020. She was 101.