In February 1962, the most powerful computer in America had worked out how to put a man into orbit around the Earth — and bring him home alive. But John Glenn didn't trust it. He had one condition before he would fly: the numbers had to be checked again — by hand — by one woman.
Her name was Katherine Johnson. Born in 1918 in West Virginia, she joined NACA — the agency that would become NASA — in 1953, in the segregated West Area Computing unit, a pool of Black women mathematicians who did the calculations by hand. They were called computers, because back then, a computer was a person.
In 1960 she became the first woman in her division credited by name as an author of a research report. In May 1961 she calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7, the first American in space — and he splashed down exactly where her numbers put him. Then, for John Glenn's Friendship 7, NASA's new IBM 7090 computer calculated the whole orbit in minutes. Glenn asked Johnson to run the same numbers by hand. Her numbers matched the machine's. Only then did he fly — three orbits around the Earth, and home safe.
Years later she helped calculate the path for Apollo 11, the mission that put the first men on the Moon. In 2015 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and NASA named a research building at Langley after her. She died in February 2020, aged 101.
Real picture: Katherine Johnson at her desk at Langley Research Center, 1966 (NASA, public domain).
Music: original music bed mixed by Claude in the build.
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