Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson

Born: August 26, 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

Died: February 24, 2020 (aged 101), Newport News, Virginia

 

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician and human computer who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. She calculated the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s first flight into space, and later it was she who John Glenn demanded to check the trajectories of his first orbital flight. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon. She was one of the women included in the book, Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, and the subsequent movie of the same name. In 2015, Vaughan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2019, Johnson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress.

Creola Katherine Coleman Johnson was born to Joylette Roberta (née Lowe) and Joshua McKinley Coleman. She was the youngest of their four children. Katherine showed an early aptitude for mathematics. After graduating high school at 14, she attended  West Virginia State  College (WVSC), graduating in 1937 with degrees in mathematics and French. After graduation she took a job teaching at an all-black public school in Marion, Virginia.

She married James Goble, her first husband in 1939, left her teaching job and was invited to enroll in the graduate mathematics program of  West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, breaking their color barrier. She was one of the first three African Americans, the only woman, to enroll in the graduate school after it was desegregated. She quit after the first semester to spend more time with her family. She found employment in teaching jobs until a family friend mentioned that National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians. She applied and was appointed to the West Area Computers unit in Langley, Virginia in 1953. Just two weeks into her tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956.

The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Johnson’s life. In 1957, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel. Johnson, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as NACA became NASA later that year. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

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.

She specialized in the study of orbital mechanics and the calculations of trajectories. She worked for the Mercury Program, Gemini Program, Appollo and the Space Shuttle. It was she who calculated the orbital mechanics of the lunar rendezvous between the Lunar Excursion Module and Command Module.

She had three daughters with her first husband, James Goble who died in 1956. Three years later she married James Johnson, to whom she was married for 60 years until his death in 2019. She co-authored 26 scientific papers and received many honors before her death in 2020 aged 101. She was succeeded by six grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. She featured in the book and movie, Hidden Figures.