12/27/2023 0 Comments Katherine johnson nasa engineer![]() Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA. If he had forgotten her name, history will not: There is now a Katherine G. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” he said. Her reputation for accuracy was such that, in February 1962, as John Glenn prepared to realize the mission of orbiting Earth, he asked that the computer’s calculations be verified by her. In 1958, NACA became NASA the mission expanded to embrace space and that’s when Johnson began her work for the space task force, calculating the trajectories of spacecraft. government - now fighting a Cold War - was a bit more open to female talent than the business world. In corporate America, the intent had never been to employ women on a permanent basis the “girls” were considered a temporary replacement for men, who began flooding into the lucrative tech industry, where “computer” now meant not an underpaid female paraprofessional, but an expensive piece of hardware. It was women who programmed the Army’s ENIAC computer, though they were not invited to the formal unveiling or the celebratory dinner.Īs Shetterly points out, by midcentury, “There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.”Īfter the war, many of these women were shouldered out of the private sector. Army engaged female computers to draw up ballistics trajectory tables. At Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the U.S. Companies like Hercules Powder and Armstrong Cork hired female physicists and chemists. Navy generated a memo citing “women’s colleges” as a “new source” of talent for its burgeoning code breaking force. history that educated women were not only recruited but competed for. As a result, World War II marked the first time in U.S. As men departed for fighting in nearly every corner of the world, women were called to participate in a major way, driving and developing these advances. Elsewhere during the war, other women did brain work to advance the Allied effort at a time when the STEM field was getting off the ground - so to speak - with huge advances in fields like radar, rocketry, computer science and communications technology. She was hired in 1953 to work at what was then called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, where she was quickly snapped up by the Flight Research Division.Īt Langley, she joined a community of female mathematicians, Black and white, that dated back to (and even a little before) World War II, when the center’s chief research mission was to ensure that Allied fighter planes, transports and bombers performed safely and well. In 1940, after a stint as a teacher, she became one of three exceptional Black students selected to integrate the graduate school at all-white West Virginia University. She received a full academic scholarship to the historically Black West Virginia State College, from which she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in math and French. As Shetterly puts it, she was a “black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school.” Born in 1918, Johnson was a precocious child who counted everything from stars to stair steps. ![]() Make no mistake: Katherine Johnson was a genius. It does not detract from Johnson’s genius to say that in her life of stunning achievement - and her long-overdue fame - she also represented a cohort of women who pioneered the STEM field in the mid-20th century, and who are only now beginning to receive credit. Henson portrayed her in the film adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling book, Hidden Figures. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the actor Taraji P. But her renown grew, and by the time she died this year, at 101, she had become a household name. In the world at large, Johnson was mostly unsung. The historic flight would prove an important step toward the ultimate goal of sending an American to orbit Earth.Īt the time, Johnson’s pivotal contribution to human spaceflight was known within NASA, as well as in the tight-knit community of African Americans she knew in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area - many of whom, like her, worked at NASA’s Langley research facility. In 1961, the Freedom 7 mission sent astronaut Alan Shepard, packed in an almost impossibly tiny capsule, hurtling up into space thanks to Johnson, he also came down, safely.
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