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Mathematician guided space travel
Tuesday, February 22, 2000
In the 1960s, while scientists contemplated our place in the cosmos and reached into space, the civil rights and women's rights movements were trying to reshape the roles of women and people of color right here on Earth. And quietly at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, all three issues came together in the work of Katherine Goble Johnson.
When America sent its first astronaut into space in 1961, his life depended on Johnson's space navigation work. And her calculations made it possible for astronauts to reach the moon in 1969.
That's because Johnson was charged with calculating the trajectories and orbits that made space flight possible.
It was quite a job for someone born in rural West Virginia in 1918. In her hometown, black children were not allowed to attend school with whites, and no African-American schools went beyond the eighth grade. Because her family-valued education, they moved each fall to Institute, W.Va. -- 120 miles away -- so that the children could attend high school and college.
In 1937 she graduated from West Virginia State College with a degree in mathematics. She worked as a teacher for many years before joining the organization that would become NASA in the early 1950s.
Johnson was hired as a pool mathematician. At the time, the mathematicians were assigned to racially segregated groups. A few years later she moved to the space flight research group. Johnson quickly became a key figure in developing the navigational techniques the astronauts needed.
During her 30-year career with NASA, Johnson earned special achievement awards on three occasions and the right to be called a trailblazer.
-- By John G. Radzilowicz, director, Henry Buhl, Jr. Planetarium & Observatory
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