The West Area computers were subject to the racist Jim Crow laws, required in theory – but not always, for Johnson, in practice – to use separate offices, toilets and cafeterias from their white counterparts, until the birth of Nasa in 1958. By 1949 Dorothy Vaughan had become the first African-American section head within the NACA, of the female-only, segregated West Area computing unit at Langley, which Johnson joined as a “computer” four years later. It was in 1943 that Langley, then part of Nasa’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), hired its first five black female mathematicians. Johnson was one of a group of remarkable women who fought every obstacle an entrenched deeply racist society could throw at them and, eventually, they won. But Shetterly’s book, and the ensuing film, with Taraji P Henson in a starring role as Johnson, helped change that. Until recently the contribution made by Johnson and her fellow African-American colleagues to the US space programme went largely unheralded outside – and sometimes inside – Nasa. “We were concerned about them getting back.” She was later involved in the early years of the space shuttle, and the Earth Resources satellite. “Everybody was concerned about them getting there,” she said in 2010. Johnson was still calculating trajectories in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first moon landing, and in 1970 when the Apollo 13 mission was aborted and nearly ended in disaster. Her trailblazing contributions were celebrated at the dedication ceremony where Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures and keynote speaker, said of the " human computers": “We are living in a present that they willed into existence with their pencils, their slide rules, their mechanical calculating machines - and, of course, their brilliant minds.Barack Obama presenting Katherine Johnson with the presidential medal of freedom in 2015. Johnson's humble response to a building named after her was said with a laugh: “You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy.” Johnson’s character and accomplishments than this building that will bear her name.” “I can’t imagine a better tribute to Mrs. “We’re here to honor the legacy of one of the most admired and inspirational people ever associated with NASA,” Langley Director David Bowles said in a press release. Johnson, her family and friends were at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new building which is part of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Henson as Johnson.Ī year later, in September 2017, 99-year-old Johnson was honored by NASA, with the dedication of a new research building which is named after her - the Katherine G. Turned into an Oscar-nominated feature film, Hidden Figures (2016), starring actress Taraji P. In November 2015, President Barack Obama presented Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race celebrated the little-known story of Johnson and her fellow African American computers. Yet, the job wasn't considered complete until Johnson was summoned to check the work of the machines, providing the go-ahead to propel John Glenn into successful orbit in 1962. This involved far more difficult calculations, to account for the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies, and by then NASA had begun using electronic computers. The next challenge was to send a man in orbit around Earth. ' " As a result, the task of plotting the path for Alan Shepard's 1961 journey to space, the first in American history, fell on her shoulders. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off. "Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. Johnson.įor Johnson, calculating space flight came down to the basics of geometry: "The early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point," she said. The following year she remarried, to decorated Navy and Army officer James A. In 1958, after NACA was reformulated into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Johnson was among the people charged with determining how to get a human into space and back.
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