Katherine Johnson's greatest work, by her own account, was a meeting in lunar orbit
Katherine Johnson became famous for something a man said. The astronauts were wary of the IBM computers, so in 1962, before his flight, John Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl" and have her run the same equations by hand on her desktop calculating machine. As she remembered it, he said: "If she says they're good, then I'm ready to go."
There was a whole life before that request. Johnson was born in West Virginia in 1918, was attending the high school on a college campus by 13, and enrolled in the college itself at 18. In the summer of 1953 she started at the Langley laboratory in West Area Computing, the all-Black section headed by Dorothy Vaughan. Two weeks in, Vaughan sent her to work with the flight research engineers, and the temporary job became permanent.
In 1960 Johnson and the engineer Ted Skopinski published a report with the equations for an orbital flight whose landing point is set in advance. It was the first time a woman in their division had been credited as an author. In all she wrote or co-wrote 26 reports.
Asked about her greatest contribution to space exploration, she talked about the calculations that helped sync Apollo's Lunar Module with the spacecraft circling the Moon. In 2015, at 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she died in 2020 at 101. A man's request made her famous. Her greatest work she named herself.
Sources
- Shetterly, M. L. Katherine Johnson Biography. NASA Langley Research Center, 22 November 2016 (updated 28 June 2024). nasa.gov
- Skopinski, T. H., Johnson, K. G. Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position. NASA Technical Note D-233, September 1960. NASA Technical Reports Server, 19980227091