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. 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. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report. 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. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. 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 the NACA became NASA later that year. 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). The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history-and Johnson’s life. Click Here For More Black History Month Posts! As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. 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. Katherine and her husband decided to move the family to Newport News, Virginia, to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her first husband, James Goble. She left her teaching job and enrolled in the graduate math program. Davis, selected her and two men to be the first black students offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president, Dr. “I counted everything,I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed . . . anything that could be counted, I did.” Even in childhood, Katherine Johnson was a girl who loved only numbers. She graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. At 18, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. By 13, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918, her intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly (on )īeing handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life.
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