Thanks to her phenomenal human computing skills, her perfect calculations helped the Apollo astronauts land and safely return from their voyage to the moon.
Born in 1918 on August 26th in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Johnson passed away in 2020 at 101 years of age, leaving behind an indelible mark on the race to space narrative.
When hired by NASA in 1953 to work as a ‘human computer’, it was her exceptional talent for numbers that enabled her to calculate the trajectory of the first American-manned flight into space. No mean feat!
What it entailed is best described in the excerpt below taken from the NASA website :
“In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission from liftoff to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space”
Her autobiography, Reaching for the Moon, was first published in 2019, and a year prior the Katherine Johnson Barbie Doll was made by Mattel as part of the Inspiring Women doll line.
Happy Women's Month - let's continue to reach for the stars.
