Johnson started working at NASA in 1953, back when it was still called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The film told the story that author Margot Lee Shetterly detailed in her book by the same name, about Black female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the space race. Henson portrayed her in the 2016 film Hidden Figures (as part of the Screen Actors Guild Award-winning cast). Much of the world learned that story-and the fact that Johnson even existed-more than a half-century later, when Taraji P. “If she says the computer is right,” he said. I'm as good as anybody, but no better.Astronaut John Glenn asked Johnson to double-check the math against a computer that had calculated Friendship 7’s path in space. “My dad taught us 'you are as good as anybody in this town, but you're no better,'” Johnson told NASA in 2008. Looking back, she said she had little time to worry about being treated unequally. Johnson spent her later years encouraging students to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In 1953, she started working at the all-black West Area Computing unit at what was then called Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton. She left after the first session to start a family with her first husband, James Goble, and returned to teaching when her three daughters grew older. Johnson taught at black public schools before becoming one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools in 1939. The small town had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, she told The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1997.Įach September, her father drove Johnson and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school and college on the campus of the historically black West Virginia State College. Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, near the Virginia border. Jackson and Vaughan had died in 20 respectively. In 2017, Johnson was brought on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony to thunderous applause. The film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and grossed more than $200 million worldwide. Johnson was portrayed in the film by actress Taraji P. The “Hidden Figures” book and film followed, telling the stories of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, among others. But in 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson - then 97 - the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Johnson and her co-workers had been relatively unsung heroes of America’s Space Race. She also worked on the Space Shuttle program before retiring in 1986. Her calculations helped the lunar lander rendezvous with the orbiting command service module. Johnson considered her work on the Apollo moon missions to be her greatest contribution to space exploration. “We get to mourn her and also commemorate the work that she did that she’s most known for at the same time,” Shetterly said. 20, 1962, for which she played an important role. Shetterly noted that Johnson died during Black History Month and a few days after the anniversary of Glenn’s orbits of the earth on Feb. “She gave us a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history.” “The wonderful gift that Katherine Johnson gave us is that her story shined a light on the stories of so many other people,” Shetterly said. Shetterly told The Associated Press on Monday that Johnson was “exceptional in every way.” “It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work,” Shetterly wrote. “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” on which the film is based. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space.
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