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A few years ago, it seemed as though the world barely remembered Katherine Johnson, one of the Black women who worked as a 'human computer' at NASA beginning in the 1950s. In recent years, though, Johnson’s role in history has been documented in books and on the big screen. Her work is celebrated in Margot Lee Shetterly's non-fiction book Hidden Figures, which recounts how Black women mathematicians helped NASA win the space race, and the racism and sexism they faced along the way. Shetterly's book was also recently adapted into a critically acclaimed movie, starring Taraji P. Henson as Johnson, and Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her colleagues Dorothy K. Vaughan and Mary Jackson, respectively.

In the '40s, '50s, and '60s, NASA hired women to do the complex mathematical work that computers do today. Women were thought to be detail-oriented and accurate, thus well-suited to the job. In Johnson's role at NASA, people trusted her with their lives — John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, said of Johnson: “Call her, and if she says the computer’s right, I’ll take it.” He wanted her to double-check the computer’s calculations on the reentry of his spacecraft Friendship 7, because he preferred to rely on her instead of a machine.

Want more space stories? Sign up for The Portalist’s newsletter, and get the best in space and science delivered straight to your inbox.

From l. to r.: Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson, Taraji P. Henson as Johnson, and Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan in Hidden Figures. Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox

Johnson was invaluable to the space program, at a time when segregation restricted the kinds of jobs available to African Americans. “There were jobs, and there were good black jobs,” says Margot Lee Shetterly in Hidden Figures. Through her work with the space program, Johnson was a pioneer for all women, but especially for Black women.

In celebration of the release of Hidden Figures, here are five extraordinary facts about an incredible woman who changed America's relationship with space forever.

She was a freshman in high school at the age of 10, and graduated from college at just 18.

Johnson during her work with NASA. Photo Credit: NASA

Johnson was a prodigy, to say the least. In 1939, the president of West Virginia State, Dr. John W. Davis, handpicked Johnson and two other Black students (both men) for spots in the university. She was the first Black female student to attend West Virginia State. Johnson enrolled as a graduate math student, but left school before completing her degree in order to start a family. Nearly fifteen years later, she started working for NASA.

RELATED: Will We Have Space Tourism in Our Lifetime?

One of Johnson’s first NASA assignments was to look at the black box data from crashed airplanes.

Johnson at NASA. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In 1953, Johnson was working as a teacher and raising her children when she learned at a family gathering that NASA, then the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), had begun hiring Black women to work as human computers. The pay was much better than her teaching salary, so she immediately applied and was offered a position. When she first joined NACA, the computers were segregated—she and her Black peers used separate restrooms in the Virginia lab where they made their calculations, and sat apart from the white computers at lunch. The human computers would not be desegregated until later in the '50s.

Soon after beginning work with the NACA, Johnson was assigned to the Flight Research Division. In one of her first projects, she had to get to the bottom of why a small propellor plane, which had been functioning perfectly normally, fell out of the sky without any warning. Johnson spent days peering through a film reader at the footage recorded by the plane’s black box, analyzing and plotting the data within for the engineers. It was her careful work that allowed engineers to discover that the flight path of a larger plane can disturb the air around it for up to a half hour after it passes through, acting as a sort of “trip wire” for a smaller plane.

RELATED: Katherine Johnson Honored in LEGO's New Set

She Worked Backwards to Make Project Mercury a Success

Johnson (far right) at Langley Research Center in 1970. Photo Credit: NASA

In 1958, NASA's Project Mercury was officially approved, with the goal to put a man in orbit around the Earth. In her role on NASA's Space Task Group, Johnson calculated astronaut Alan Shepard's trajectory. Johnson said of the calculations, “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." It was simple geometry, Johnson claimed, because the first suborbital flights of the Mercury years were parabolas. She only had to take into account the rotation of the Earth, which is why working backwards from the landing site was easier than working forwards.

RELATED: 15 Awesome Exoplanets Humans Have Discovered So Far

Johnson worked on the calculations that allowed the Apollo astronauts to return home from the Moon.

Photo Credit: NASA

It wasn’t just the Mercury program that Johnson worked on. During the Apollo years, she helped calculate exactly how the lunar lander on the Moon’s surface (which was rotating on its own axis as well as rotating around the Earth), could rendezvous and dock with the Apollo command and service module, in orbit around the Moon. “Everybody was concerned about them getting there; we were concerned about them getting back,” said Johnson. That’s a lot of math, and it’s thanks to her impeccable work that the process was successful.

Want more space stories? Sign up for The Portalist’s newsletter, and get the best in space and science delivered straight to your inbox.

She Was Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015

Photo Credit: NASA on Flickr

Photo: NASA / Flickr

“Black women have been a part of every great movement in American history—even if they weren’t always given a voice,” said President Barack Obama in September 2015. Two months later, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest honor for civilians, to Johnson.

“In her 33 years at NASA, Katherine was a pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender, showing generations of young people that everyone can excel in math and science, and reach for the stars,” President Obama stated at the medal ceremony. Without the contributions of Johnson and her fellow human computers, without their exceptional minds and willingness to fight for equal treatment, without their ability to swallow the small daily humiliations that came with being Black women in the 1950s, '60s, and beyond in order to work for the greater good of our country, our nation might look very different. Johnson made invaluable contributions to our history, and deserves our recognition and respect.

[Via Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly; Whitehouse.gov; Whitehouse.gov; NASA; NASA; Katherine Johnson: America's First Space Flight)]

ew years ago, it seemed as though the world barely remembered Katherine Johnson, one of the Black women who worked as a 'human computer' at NASA beginning in the 1950s. In recent years, though, Johnson’s role in history has been documented in books and on the big screen. Her work is celebrated in Margot Lee Shetterly's non-fiction book Hidden Figures, which recounts how Black women mathematicians helped NASA win the space race, and the racism and sexism they faced along the way. Shetterly's book was also recently adapted into a critically acclaimed movie, starring Taraji P. Henson as Johnson, and Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her colleagues Dorothy K. Vaughan and Mary Jackson, respectively.

In the '40s, '50s, and '60s, NASA hired women to do the complex mathematical work that computers do today. Women were thought to be detail-oriented and accurate, thus well-suited to the job. In Johnson's role at NASA, people trusted her with their lives — John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, said of Johnson: “Call her, and if she says the computer’s right, I’ll take it.” He wanted her to double-check the computer’s calculations on the reentry of his spacecraft Friendship 7, because he preferred to rely on her instead of a machine.

Want more space stories? Sign up for The Portalist’s newsletter, and get the best in space and science delivered straight to your inbox.

From l. to r.: Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson, Taraji P. Henson as Johnson, and Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan in Hidden Figures. Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox

Johnson was invaluable to the space program, at a time when segregation restricted the kinds of jobs available to African Americans. “There were jobs, and there were good black jobs,” says Margot Lee Shetterly in Hidden Figures. Through her work with the space program, Johnson was a pioneer for all women, but especially for Black women.

In celebration of the release of Hidden Figures, here are five extraordinary facts about an incredible woman who changed America's relationship with space forever.

She was a freshman in high school at the age of 10, and graduated from college at just 18.

Johnson during her work with NASA. Photo Credit: NASA

Johnson was a prodigy, to say the least. In 1939, the president of West Virginia State, Dr. John W. Davis, handpicked Johnson and two other Black students (both men) for spots in the university. She was the first Black female student to attend West Virginia State. Johnson enrolled as a graduate math student, but left school before completing her degree in order to start a family. Nearly fifteen years later, she started working for NASA.

RELATED: Will We Have Space Tourism in Our Lifetime?

One of Johnson’s first NASA assignments was to look at the black box data from crashed airplanes.

Johnson at NASA. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In 1953, Johnson was working as a teacher and raising her children when she learned at a family gathering that NASA, then the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), had begun hiring Black women to work as human computers. The pay was much better than her teaching salary, so she immediately applied and was offered a position. When she first joined NACA, the computers were segregated—she and her Black peers used separate restrooms in the Virginia lab where they made their calculations, and sat apart from the white computers at lunch. The human computers would not be desegregated until later in the '50s.

Soon after beginning work with the NACA, Johnson was assigned to the Flight Research Division. In one of her first projects, she had to get to the bottom of why a small propellor plane, which had been functioning perfectly normally, fell out of the sky without any warning. Johnson spent days peering through a film reader at the footage recorded by the plane’s black box, analyzing and plotting the data within for the engineers. It was her careful work that allowed engineers to discover that the flight path of a larger plane can disturb the air around it for up to a half hour after it passes through, acting as a sort of “trip wire” for a smaller plane.

RELATED: Katherine Johnson Honored in LEGO's New Set

She Worked Backwards to Make Project Mercury a Success

Johnson (far right) at Langley Research Center in 1970. Photo Credit: NASA

In 1958, NASA's Project Mercury was officially approved, with the goal to put a man in orbit around the Earth. In her role on NASA's Space Task Group, Johnson calculated astronaut Alan Shepard's trajectory. Johnson said of the calculations, “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." It was simple geometry, Johnson claimed, because the first suborbital flights of the Mercury years were parabolas. She only had to take into account the rotation of the Earth, which is why working backwards from the landing site was easier than working forwards.

RELATED: 15 Awesome Exoplanets Humans Have Discovered So Far

Johnson worked on the calculations that allowed the Apollo astronauts to return home from the Moon.

Photo Credit: NASA

It wasn’t just the Mercury program that Johnson worked on. During the Apollo years, she helped calculate exactly how the lunar lander on the Moon’s surface (which was rotating on its own axis as well as rotating around the Earth), could rendezvous and dock with the Apollo command and service module, in orbit around the Moon. “Everybody was concerned about them getting there; we were concerned about them getting back,” said Johnson. That’s a lot of math, and it’s thanks to her impeccable work that the process was successful.

Want more space stories? Sign up for The Portalist’s newsletter, and get the best in space and science delivered straight to your inbox.

She Was Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015

Photo Credit: NASA on Flickr

Photo: NASA / Flickr

“Black women have been a part of every great movement in American history—even if they weren’t always given a voice,” said President Barack Obama in September 2015. Two months later, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest honor for civilians, to Johnson.

“In her 33 years at NASA, Katherine was a pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender, showing generations of young people that everyone can excel in math and science, and reach for the stars,” President Obama stated at the medal ceremony. Without the contributions of Johnson and her fellow human computers, without their exceptional minds and willingness to fight for equal treatment, without their ability to swallow the small daily humiliations that came with being Black women in the 1950s, '60s, and beyond in order to work for the greater good of our country, our nation might look very different. Johnson made invaluable contributions to our history, and deserves our recognition and respect.

[Via Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly; Whitehouse.gov; Whitehouse.gov; NASA; NASA; Katherine Johnson: America's First Space Flight)]

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Katherine johnson wedsite scroll down to see this website

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There's no protocol for women attending," says a white man in a suit holding a sheaf of papers.

"There's no protocol for a man circling the Earth either, sir," Taraji P. Henson retorts in my favorite line from the new trailer for the movie "Hidden Figures," due theaters this January.

Henson plays Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician at NASA working on the space program in its earliest days, beginning in the 1950s. Many of NASA's first missions were made possible by Johnson's intrepid, unparalleled calculations.

The movie is based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, who grew up near NASA's Langley Research Center, where Johnson and her colleagues worked.

Johnson still lives near Langley in Hampton, Virginia, where she'll be celebrating her 98th birthday later this month. Keep scrolling to learn the true story of her incredible life.

View As: One Page Slides

As a child, Johnson has said in interviews, she loved to count. Her father placed a premium on education and insisted all four of his children go to college, working overtime to pay for it. Johnson says this atmosphere was crucial to her success. "I was always around people who were learning something. I liked to learn."

20th Century Fox/YouTube

Sources: NASA, interview

Johnson graduated high school at 14 and college at 18. Her high school principal sowed the first seeds for her career in space — he would walk her home after school pointing out the constellations overhead. At college, a family friend from her home town who knew her talent for math ordered her to enroll in her class.

Faculty circle at West Virginia State, Johnson's alma mater.Google Street View

Sources: NASA, interview, interview

Later, she was mentored by Dr. William W. Schiefflin Claytor, who suggested she aim to become a research mathematician. He created the classes he knew she would need to succeed, including one in which she was the only student. Throughout her education, she says she succeeded in part because she was always asking questions — even when people tried to ignore her, her hand stayed up.

Sources: NASA, interview, interview

After graduating, Johnson became a math teacher, then married and had children. She returned to teaching when her husband got sick. He died a few years later of cancer and in 1959 she married the gentleman she scolds in the trailer for asking "They let women handle that sort of thing?" (In real life they were introduced by her minister, not co-workers armed with pie.) But back to the science.

20th Century Fox/YouTube

Source: The Visionary Project

Johnson was hired in 1953 to work for NASA — then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), since there was no space program at the time — at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. Langley was a hub of airplane research and the predecessor of Houston's Johnson Space Center.

Airmen at NASA'a Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.NASA

At the time, the agency hired human computers to do the math that powered the more prestigious engineers' work. Johnson worked mainly by hand, filling large tables of numbers with complex calculations. Her first assignment was to process the black box data from crashed planes. "You had a mission and you worked on it. And it was important to you to do your job," she said in a 2011 interview. "And play bridge at lunch."

NASA

Source: WHROTV interview

Her move to working on rockets came from her endless curiosity and talent. She'd been pulled in to work with an all-male flight research team on a temporary basis. She was so good they chose not to send her back.

AP

"When the space program came along I just happened to be working with guys and then they had briefings on it," she said in the 2011 interview. "I asked permission to go. And they said 'well, the girls don't usually go.' I said 'well, is there a law?'" She was allowed into the meetings.

20th Century Fox/YouTube

Sources: WHROTV interview, NASA

Johnson had had some experience with calculating machines before she joined NACA, so she was better prepared to exploit the technology as the agency incorporated it. NACA was hesitant to rely on electronic calculators, particularly for the type of life-and-death calculations that built the space program. So Johnson shined both for her talents in picking up new techniques and for her accuracy in manually checking the computers before they were trusted.

An IBM 704, invented in the late 1950s, in use at NASA.NASA

NACA and the rest of the defense industry had been forced to hire African Americans by executive order during World War II, and there were black and white female mathematicians working as separate groups at the agency. Johnson says her team was better. "[The male engineers] preferred the black mathematicians, they said we were better than the white girls. For one thing, all of us had been to college," she said, whereas only some of the white women had.

20th Century Fox/YouTube

Sources: Visionary Project interview, WHROTV interview

And while the female computers weren't given the same respect as male engineers, that never fazed Johnson. "Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men," she said in a 2011 interview. "Men don't pay attention to small things. They aren't interested in how you do it, just [in] give me the answer."

Human computers at NASA.NASA

Sources: Visionary Project interview, WHROTV interview

Johnson worked closely with Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, both extraordinary scientists in their own right. (They are played in the movie by Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.)

20th Century Fox/YouTube

Dorothy Vaughan was a mathematician and the head for almost a decade of the West Area Computing Unit, the team of black female human computers. Later, she became a FORTRAN programmer.

NASA human computers Dorothy Vaughan, Leslie Hunter, and Vivian Adair.NASA

Source: The Human Computer Project

Mary Jackson specialized in the wind tunnel experiments run on the airplane side of NASA's work. She eventually held a position in the Office of Equal Opportunity.

NASA

Source: NASA, NASA

As for Johnson, her calculations underpinned many of NASA's most important projects.

20th Century Fox/YouTube

In 1961, on the strength of Johnson's work, Alan Shepherd became the first American to go into space. Johnson calculated his trajectory, the path he would take from launch to landing. If she was wrong, the best case scenario was that NASA wouldn't have known where to pick him up.

Alan Shepherd, after becoming the first American to go into space, being picked up by a US Marines helicopter.NASA

Sources: NASA, NASA, NASA

"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 said in an interview. "I said, 'Let me do it. 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.' That was my forte."

Astronaut Alan Shepard after his Mercury capsule was recovered.NASA (via Wikimedia)

Sources: NASA, NASA, NASA

By the time the Mercury mission was in the works to make John Glenn the first man to orbit Earth, NASA had begun incorporating electronic calculators, but everyone was still suspicious of the new technology. Glenn insisted Johnson check the computer's math. "'If she says the computer's right, I'll take it,'" Johnson says he told the agency. (Other reports give his line as the hard-to-stomach "Get the girl to check the numbers.")

John Glenn training at NASA's Langley facility in 1960 before becoming the first American to orbit Earth.NASA

Sources: interview, The Root

Johnson also lent her numerical genius to the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing mission. "Everybody was concerned about them getting there," Johnson said in a 2010 interview. "We were concerned about them getting back."

Katherine Johnson in 1966.NASA

Sources: interview, interview

There were an incredible number of factors at play: Earth's rotation, the moon's location, when you took off, when you reached the moon. "It was intricate but it was possible," she said. The mission went according to plan.

San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive

Sources: interview, interview

Her numbers weren't just there to make sure everything went right — she also stepped in when something went wrong. In 1970, Apollo 13, which had been bound for the moon, was stymied by the explosions of two oxygen tanks. Johnson was one of the mathematicians who scrambled to calculate a safe path back to Earth for the stranded astronauts. That work became the basis of a system that only requires one star observation matched with an onboard star chart for astronauts to pinpoint their location.

Katherine Johnson in 1980.NASA

Sources: interview, NASA, NASA

Johnson retired in 1986, but her huge contribution to the space program has only been reaching the public spotlight for the past few years. Part of that is, as she is the first to admit, science is a collaborative endeavor. "I never took any credit because we always worked as a team, it was never just one person," she said in a 2010 interview.

Katherine Johnson with other NASA scientists who began their careers as human computers (from left to right: Christine Darden, Katherine Johnson, Janet Stephens, Katherine Smith and Sharon Stack).David C. Bowman/NASA

Source: NASA, interview

Last year, President Obama gave Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the most prestigious honor available to civilians.

Evan Vucci/AP

Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote the book "Hidden Figures," had an interesting path to Johnson's story. She grew up near the Langley facility in Hampton, Virginia — a spot chosen because the agency wanted a rural location in easy reach of Washington, DC. When the facility was built, it was just an overnight steamer ride away from the capital.

Langley's Lunar Landing Research Facility, where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and 22 other astronauts practiced for Apollo missions.NASA

Source: speech

As a child, Shetterly visited her father's office at NASA, where he was a researcher. "There were always so many women. There were lots of women, a diverse group of women — women of all colors, women of all ages. Some of the women there were my grandmother's age. But it never occurred to me to question why they were there," Shetterly told an audience at Langley in 2014. "It wasn't until many years later that I left Hampton and left Langley and realized that that wasn't the way the world worked." When she was back in town visiting her parents, her father began pointing out women who had been mathematicians at Langley. That became the seed of the book and the movie.

20th Century Fox/YouTube

Source: speech

Pharrell Williams, who wrote the score for the Hidden Figures movie, also grew up in Hampton and has worked on STEM outreach programs with the agency before.

Astronaut Leland Melvin and musician Pharrell Williams at a NASA event encouraging children to go into science and math.Sean Smith/NASA

Source: NASA

Earlier this year, NASA dedicated a new data center on Langley's campus to Johnson. (The cast of the movie filmed a video to congratulate her.) She was also given a Silver Snoopy award by astronaut Leland Melvin, which recognizes "outstanding performance, contributing to flight safety and mission success." That trophy will join, among many others that Johnson has received, an American flag that flew to the moon.

David C. Bowman/NASA

Sources: NASA

Johnson's time as a teacher hasn't ever really ended. She strongly believes people need to learn how to learn. "I teach you what the problem is, how to attack it — if you attack it properly you'll get the answer," she said in a 2011 interview.

WHROTV / YouTube

Source: interview

And she is still an enthusiastic supporter of the space program. "I'm very proud of what they're doing and how they're doing it and why," she said. "[People ask] 'What good does it do us to go to space?' Well what good does it do you to stay home?"

This photograph, nicknamed "Earthrise," was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968, by the first astronauts to visit the moon.NASA

Source: interview

Here's the trailer for "Hidden Figures," the movie that dramatizes Johnson's life and this often forgotten chapter in NASA's history.

Margot Lee Shetterly's book "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race" will be published September 6.

The movie "Hidden Figures," starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, will be released January 13.

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Synopsis. Born in 1918 in West Virginia, Katherine G. Johnson made the most of limited educational opportunities for African Americans, graduating from college at age 18. ...

Early Years and Education. ...

The 'Computer' ...

NASA Pioneer. ...

Awards and Legacy.

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Her children were Constance Goble, Joylette Goble, Katherine Goble and she had two husbands they were Colonel James A. Johnson and James Francis Goble.

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Mathematician and computer scientist Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia to Joylette and Joshua Coleman. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a farmer and janitor. From a young age, Johnson enjoyed mathematics and could easily solve mathematical equations.Feb 6, 2012

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biography.com

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Who Was Katherine Johnson?

Katherine Johnson made the most of limited educational opportunities for African Americans, graduating from college at age 18. She began working in aeronautics as a "computer" in 1952, and after the formation of NASA, she performed the calculations that sent astronauts into orbit in the early 1960s and to the moon in 1969. Johnson was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and saw her story brought to light through a book and a feature film the following year. She passed away on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101.

Early Years and Education

Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. A bright child with a gift for numbers, she breezed through her classes and completed the eighth grade by age 10. Although her town didn't offer classes for African Americans after that point, her father, Joshua, drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where they lived while she attended high school.

Johnson enrolled at West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) in Institute, West Virginia, where she encountered a hands-on faculty. One particularly engaged professor was Dr. William W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, who was determined to prepare Johnson to become a research mathematician. At age 18, she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French.

The following year, Johnson became one of three students to desegregate West Virginia University's graduate school in Morgantown. However, she found the environment less welcoming than it had been in Institute, and never completed her program there.

The 'Computer'

Beginning in the late 1930s, Johnson taught math and French at schools in Virginia and West Virginia.

In 1952, Johnson learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring African American women to serve as "computers;" namely, people who performed and checked calculations for technological developments. Johnson applied, and the following year she was accepted for a position at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Johnson not only proved adept at her calculations, she displayed a curiosity and assertiveness that caught her superiors by surprise. "The women did what they were told to do," she recalled. "They didn't ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why."

After only two weeks, Johnson was transferred from the African American computing pool to Langley's flight research division, where she talked her way into meetings and earned additional responsibilities. She achieved success despite difficulties at home: In 1956, her husband died of a brain tumor.

NASA Pioneer

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. The following year she remarried, to decorated Navy and Army officer James A. Johnson.

For 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. "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. I said, 'Let me do it. 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 .' " 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.

The next challenge was to send a man in orbit around Earth. This involved far more difficult calculations, to account for the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies, and by then NASA had begun using electronic 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.

While the work of electronic computers took on increased importance at NASA, Johnson remained highly valuable for her unwavering accuracy. She performed calculations for the historic 1969 Apollo 11 trip to the moon, and the following year, when Apollo 13 experienced a malfunction in space, her contributions to contingency procedures helped ensure its safe return.

Johnson continued to serve as a key asset for NASA, helping to develop its Space Shuttle program and Earth Resources Satellite, until her retirement in 1986.

Photo: NASA

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. It was also turned into an Oscar-nominated feature film, Hidden Figures (2016), starring actress Taraji P. Henson as Johnson.

Awards and Legacy

Johnson was honored with an array of awards for her groundbreaking work. Among them are the 1967 NASA Lunar Orbiter Spacecraft and Operations team award, and the National Technical Association's designation as its 1997 Mathematician of the Year. Additionally, she earned honorary degrees from SUNY Farmingdale, Maryland's Capitol College, Virginia's Old Dominion University and West Virginia University.

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. It was also turned into an Oscar-nominated feature film, Hidden Figures (2016), starring actress Taraji P. Henson as Johnson.

A 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. Johnson Computational Research Facility. 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.

"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. "I can't imagine a better tribute to Mrs. Johnson's character and accomplishments than this building that will bear her name."

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."

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."

She said to Johnson: "Your work changed our history and your history has changed our future."

When asked to give her advice to NASA employees who will follow in her footsteps and work in the new building named after her, Johnson simply said: "Like what you do and then you will do your best."

Spouse and Children

In 1939, Johnson married James Francis Goble, with whom she had three daughters: Joylette, Katherine and Constance.

Death

Johnson passed away on February 24, 2020. She was 101 years old.

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Katherine Johnson made the most of limited educational opportunities for African Americans, graduating from college at age 18. She began working in aeronautics as a "computer" in 1952, and after the formation of NASA, she performed the calculations that sent astronauts into orbit in the early 1960s and to the moon in 1969.