In 1961, Johnson calculated and plotted the trajectory Alan Shepard’s space capsule would follow as it briefly left Earth. (Also see “25 Years on, Collapse of Soviet Union Still Brings Cheers-And Tears.”) Also among them was Mary Jackson, who would go on to become the first female African-American engineer employed by NASA.Īfter just two weeks, Johnson was transferred to the Flight Research Division, where she and her colleagues were eventually tasked with helping NASA meet the challenge posed by the Soviets with the 1957 launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite, followed by the 1961 orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. Johnson applied for a job as a computer at Langley and went to work under the direction of Dorothy Vaughan, the first African-American woman to supervise the center’s cadre of human calculators. In aeronautics labs around the country, these jobs were often filled by women. Mechanical computers were just beginning to emerge in research labs, so to perform complex calculations, most teams primarily relied on skilled people who were nimble-minded and facile with numbers. Then, in 1953, a small group of "human computers” at Langley Research Center in Virginia came calling. “You could be a nurse or a teacher,” she said in a video interview with MAKERS.
With limited options, Johnson initially took a job teaching math, French, and music at Virginia public schools, since that was, she said, the obvious thing to do with her talents.
#PICTURE OF KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA MOVIE#
That brilliance, which is chronicled in a recent book and the upcoming movie Hidden Figures, would eventually help the United States win the space race, a geopolitical competition that peaked with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.īut in the first half of the 20th century, Johnson was penned in by stereotypes about her race and her gender, as well as Jim Crow laws that mandated the segregation of African-Americans. By 18, she’d finished college, where she excelled as a math major and was sometimes the only student in the hardest courses offered. Johnson started high school by the time she was 10. She counted everything: the steps between her house and the road, the number of dishes she’d washed-anything that could be quantified.
As a girl growing up in rural West Virginia, Katherine Johnson loved to count.
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