There, engineers were turning out huge amounts of data in nascent fields like jet engine and wing shape design, and faster-than-sound aircraft. Then she heard there were jobs on offer at the Langley aeronautical lab near Newport News, Virginia, part of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
Even so, for many years teaching was the only work open to her. Born in 1918, she was in high school by age 10 and left college with degrees in French and mathematics at just 18. So how did Johnson come to be as integral to US success in space as household names like Glenn and Neil Armstrong?įrom an early age it was clear Johnson was clever. Racial segregation was widespread and no woman was considered responsible enough even to take out a loan on their own. Almost all her colleagues were white and male.
He was talking about 43-year-old black woman Katherine Johnson. To make it back alive, Glenn had to put his faith in the numbers.īut Glenn didn’t trust the numbers, he trusted the “girl” who devised them. And Glenn was riding on an Atlas rocket – a bomb with a seat belt, its firecracker course plotted out in exquisitely precise calculations. American pride and pre-eminence were riding on Glenn. Five years before, the Soviets had shot Sputnik into space and the US was lagging badly behind. IT WAS February 1962, and John Glenn was about to go on the journey of a lifetime. Katherine Johnson fought hard to prove she was more than a mere “computer”
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