faster than ever before, as well as aircrafts that might one day be able to
go into space.
Katherine moved swiftly up the ranks, going from being a computer to working in the Flight Research Division in just six months. Her male colleagues were beginning to respect her work as a mathematician more. In 1958, NACA was turned into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, so Katherine became part of the Space Task Force, the main group backing the effort to try to get a human into space. She was dedicated to her work, and very interested in it, too.
From 1959 to 1960, Katherine was devoted to calculating the trajectory for the first American space flight, and co-authored a research report with the data they needed to figure out exactly where to launch the capsule from, and exactly where it would land. When the report was published, it was the first time a woman had gotten her name printed on such an important document as an author. In 1959, she also married James Johnson (James Goble had died three years earlier).
Thanks to Katherine’s help, NASA sent their first man into space in 1961, and sent their first person into orbit around Earth in 1962. She had done much of the checking and rechecking of numbers to make sure that the new electronic computers hadn’t made any mistakes while calculating the trajectory of the flights. Katherine also did a good part of this double-checking for the Friendship 7 mission at astronaut John Glenn’s request, when he was unsure if the math for his orbits had been done correctly. Katherine found that there was “very good agreement” between what the computers had generated, and what she had calculated, and that all the numbers were correct. Katherine was a hero.
In 1969,NASA sent the first person to walk on the moon. Katherine was proud of all the hard work she had done to help NASA achieve this feat, but she only allowed herself a brief period of time to celebrate. She knew that there was always more work to be done and more wonderful discoveries to make.
Katherine retired from NASA in 1986. In 2015, she won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2016, NASA named the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility after the amazing woman who had been such a valuable part of NASA for so long.
If you would like to find out more about Katherine, you can read Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures (Young Reader’s Edition, 2016) or watch the movie based on the book.
- Emma Hemsch