“Everything was so new - the whole idea of going to space was new and daring. There were no textbooks, so we had to write them.”
-Katherine Johnson
Early Life
Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She enrolled in West Virginia State College at 18 where she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. She then graduated with highest honors in 1937. After college, she started teaching at a black public school in Virginia. Later on in 1939, she was chosen along with 2 other men to integrate West Virginia's Graduate schools. They were to be the first black students at the state's flagship school. This was a big barrier breaking point in her life, but she didn’t stop there.
Middle Life
Katherine later left the flagship school to start a family with her husband James Francis Globe. After having 3 children, She returned to teaching. In 1952 a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. A year later she began work there. The next four years she spent her time analyzing data from flight tests, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. Sadly in December of 1956 her husband died of cancer. The next year, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology. In 1959 she got remarried to Colonel James A. Johnson.
Achievements/Later Life
In 1960, Katherine and engineer Ted Skopinski co authored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position. This project was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division received credit for being an author of a research report. She also did a trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 Freedom 7 mission, America’s first human spaceflight. Her most well known accomplishment was the work she did for the Friendship 7 orbital mission of John Glenn. Computers were programmed to do all the math but there were sometimes problems so Katherine’s job was to make sure everything was correct. As a part of the preflight checklist, John Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl” to run the same numbers that had been programmed into the computer. In 2015 at age 97, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and In 2019 she was awarded Congressional Gold Medal. She is still alive today.