“A barrier breaker and inspiration for women of color everywhere, Katherine’s legendary work with NASA will forever leave a mark on our history,” she tweeted.ĬORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the year ‘Hidden Figures’ was released.In the 1960s, Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn and others absorbed the accolades of being the first men in space. Kamala Harris, who introduced a bill to honor Johnson and the “hidden figures” in 2019, mourned the passing of the “icon and brilliant mathematician.” “At NASA we will never forget her courage and leadership and the milestones we could not have reached without her.” Johnson helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space,” he said in a statement. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine called Johnson an “American hero.” “We always worked as a team,” she said in a 2010 interview.
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Praise for their work was certainly overdue, but Johnson resisted taking full credit for the Computer Pool’s accomplishments. Around the office in the 1960s, she and her colleagues were called as “computers in skirts” and worked in a segregated facility. In 2015, President Barack Obama honored Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her pivotal work in American space travel.īut before all of that, Johnson’s work went largely unrecognized. Vaughan and Jackson received theirs posthumously.
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And in November, the three women plus engineer Christine Darden received Congressional Gold Medals for their contributions to space travel. A street in front of NASA headquarters in Washington was renamed “ Hidden Figures Way” for the three women in July. NASA renamed a facility for Johnson in February 2019. Katherine Johnson, who hand-crunched the numbers for America's first manned space flight, is 100 today His mission – and Johnson’s role in it – helped nudge the US ahead in the space race.īy the time Johnson retired from NASA in 1986, she’d mapped the moon’s surface ahead of the 1969 landing and helped astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 safely land back on Earth.Īfter the release of the book “Hidden Figures,” which was published in 2016 and turned into a film the following year, officials lobbed heaps of praise on Johnson and two other black women mathematicians in the agency’s Computer Pool, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. She gave the OK, and Glenn’s flight was a success. “‘If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go,’” Johnson remembered Glenn saying. He was skeptical of the computers that calculated his spacecraft’s trajectory, so he told engineers to “get the girl” and compare Johnson’s handwritten calculations to the computer’s. John Glenn requested her help before his orbit around Earth in 1962. She co-authored a paper on the safety of orbital landings in 1960 – the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division received credit for a report.ĭespite often being the only woman in briefings, she quickly gained notice for her accuracy. She was tasked with performing trajectory analysis for Alan Shepherd’s 1961 mission, the first American human spaceflight.
NASA renames facility for real-life 'Hidden Figures' hero Katherine Johnson Katherine Johnson, 1918-2020 /Vkp0MgfwtH- NASA STEM February 24, 2020īut midway through the ’50s, the space race between the US and the Soviet Union began to intensify. And there will always, always be mathematics."
Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology.
She started in 1953 in the facility’s segregated wing for women before she was quickly transferred to the Flight Research Division, where she remained for several years. She was one of several black researchers with college degrees hired for the agency’s aeronautical lab through the initiative. She started her career as a teacher but had her sights set on mathematical research.įollowing an executive order that prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry, Johnson was hired at NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and NASA’s predecessor. Her preternatural talent for math was quickly evident, and she became one of three black students chosen to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools, according to her NASA biography. Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918. Her work went largely unrecognized until the release of 2016’s “Hidden Figures,” a film portrayal of Johnson’s accomplishments while the space agency was still largely segregated. The NASA women who inspired 'Hidden Figures' will get Congressional gold medals NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson was one of the black women to have made spaceflights possible for US crews.
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