“You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it.”
Even if “where you want it to come down” is on the moon.
Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician (or “human calculator”) and Hidden Figure whose work paved the way for manned spaceflight, died at the age of 101 at her retirement home in Virginia.
Johnson began her work at NASA in 1953 when it was still the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA. She was responsible for calculating first airplane and then rocket trajectories — but after proving her worth to her superiors at NASA, she became the key to putting Alan Shepard into suborbital flight in 1961, John Glenn into orbit in 1962, and, eventually, Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 on the moon.
She worked at NASA for decades, helping to launch the space shuttle program in the early 1980s.
She went largely unnoticed, though, until she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015 and was immortalized in the best-selling book Hidden Figures, which was then adapted into a blockbuster Academy Award-winning film.
Her greatest contributions, she said, were “the calculations that helped sync Project Apollo’s lunar lander with the moon-orbiting command and service module.” Those calculations ensured the crew of Apollo 11 not only landed on the moon safely but also returned to Earth.
That takes more than simple math. Johnson was a genius, becoming more reliable than NASA’s mechanical computer, an IBM 7090, and becoming so invaluable to the space program that Glenn demanded she be tasked with double-checking the IBM’s calculations for his groundbreaking flight.
Johnson was born on Aug. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a town that, the Chicago Sun-Times notes, “had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade. Each September, her father drove Johnson and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school and college on the campus of the historically black West Virginia State College.”
“My dad taught us ‘you are as good as anybody in this town, but you’re no better,’” Johnson reportedly said in 2008. “I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”
Johnson eventually qualified for graduate school but left after the first semester to get married and have a family. When her three daughters were the right age, she became a teacher, and then a “human computer” at NASA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia.
At the time, though, Johnson couldn’t use the same office facilities, even the same bathroom, as white NASA employees. The campus was segregated, and though she was integral to NASA’s missions, she was kept apart from her team, at least at first.
“Ms. Johnson helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on social media after Johnson’s death. “Her dedication and skill as a mathematician helped put humans on the Moon and before that made it possible for our astronauts to take the first steps in space that we now follow on a journey to Mars.”
For Johnson, though, space was a calling, not a job.
“Do your best, but like it. If you don’t like it, shame on you,” Johnson has said about her time at NASA. “I like work. I like the stars and the stories we were telling, and it was a joy to contribute to the literature that was going to be coming out. But little did I think it would go this far.
“I loved going to work every single day.”
Emily Zanotti is the senior editor of the Daily Wire.
