Katherine Johnson was an African American whose remarkable mathematician contributions were significant to the success of Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight to put a man into Earth's orbit and many other spaceflight programs. She overcame the persistence of discrimination and gender prejudice, she grew from mathematical tasks, like computing experimental flight and ground-test data for the NACA, to the application of spacecraft trajectories and spacecraft control calculations for NASA.
Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia to Joylette and Joshua Coleman. Her fascination with numbers got her to jump ahead several grades in school. Their county didn't offer schooling to African-Americans past grade eight, so her father took the family to Institute, West Virginia, where she could attend high school. Katherine was only ten years old at the time and graduated high school at fourteen. At 18, she enrolled at West Virginia State College. She graduated with the highest honors in 1937. In 1939, she was one of the first three African-Americans chosen to desegregate West Virginia State College. However, after the first session, she decided to leave school and start a family with her husband James Goble.
In 1953, Katherine was offered a position at NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). She first worked in a group of African American women reading data and making mathematical calculations. Sadly, her husband James died in December 1956. In 1957, the Russians launched the world’s first satellite into space. As part of the race to catch up, in 1958, NACA became NASA. The group she was in became the Space Task Force, tasked with figuring out how to get a human into space and back. She verified the calculations for John Glenn's orbit around earth. It was then that she married her second husband, Colonel James Johnson. Katherine analyzed Alan Shepard’s May 1961 Mercury mission, America’s first human suborbital spaceflight.
She also was a part of the team that calculated the trajectory of Apollo 11's flight to the moon in 1969 and worked on the plan to save the Apollo 13 crew. She also contributed to the 1969 moon landing and helped ensure the safe return of stranded astronauts on the aborted Apollo 13 moon mission in 1970. She worked on the Space Shuttle, the Earth Resources Satellite, and on plans for a Mars mission. Katherine retired in 1986. Katherine was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 16, 2015, and the Congressional Gold Medal. Also, in 2016, NASA dedicated the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Building in honor of her work in space travel. That year Margot Lee Shetterly published Hidden Figures, a book about the West Computers, including Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Katherine Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101.
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Last edited 2/29/2020 4:35:58 AM
