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Katherine Johnson
The 'human computer' John Glenn trusted more than the machine before he orbited the Earth.
The rise
A prodigy from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, whose town had no high school for Black children, she graduated from West Virginia State at eighteen with degrees in maths and French, and in 1939 was one of three Black students chosen to integrate West Virginia University's graduate school. In 1953 she joined the segregated West Area Computing unit at NACA's Langley laboratory.
What they did
She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, co-authored the first report from her division to carry a woman's name, and in 1962 re-checked by hand the electronic computer's orbital numbers at John Glenn's request before Friendship 7 flew. Her work fed the Apollo 11 lunar landing and the Space Shuttle, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 at 97.
The full picture
Her contribution was invisible for half a century, and the 2016 film Hidden Figures dramatised it with inventions, including a segregated-bathroom scene she said never happened to her. She was one of dozens of Black women computers at Langley whose names remain unknown, and her own modesty long deflected credit.
Why it matters
Johnson's story rewrote who is remembered in the history of spaceflight and gave a generation of Black girls proof that the equations of the Space Age had their handwriting on them.
“Like what you do, and then you will do your best.”