Remember the scene from the movie Apollo 13?
It would take these many years later to discover that the mathematical calculations used by astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise to make their journey home within a fireball’s breadth of their lives were matching the numbers done by hand by Katherine Johnson.
But that isn’t all … on her list of notables was also astronaut John Glenn, who died last December at the age of 95.
Turns out Mrs. Johnson’s super-story of brains, unmatched wit, and outstanding unction would be told more than 50 years later in a book entitled “Hidden Figures.”
Today, on her 100th birthday, we salute this “First Lady of Space” whose “hidden story” is hidden no more.
There are so many more of us out here like her — young Black women who not only love mathematics and calculus and geometry, but who are exceedingly good at it.
Even when I tutored them, they were eager to bypass all of the reading and English lessons to get at the math and when I wanted to turn to other teaching activities, they bored easily and didn’t wake back up or even act in the least bit interested until I said “Math Time!” The boys in my class could not keep up with them, and that was almost without exception except for one.
It is amazing how every possible misogynist notion about women and math gets blown out of the water the moment a tutor walks into a room full of young Black girls who enjoy nothing more than mastering calculations and turning numbers into every possible possibility imaginable.
Two of my dearest friends, one from high school and one I met on Facebook, are two of the most profound math whizzes I have ever known.
The first one was hired right out of college with a job as an engineer in Washington DC making $65k — BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s. It’s nothing short of a miracle for anyone to be offered that kind of starting salary in 2018, let alone how phenomenal that must have been coming out of the “Good Times” and “Jeffersons” generation of the 1970s into the “Different World” and “Cosby Show” generation of the 1980s.
The other young lady, whom I’ve been connected with on Facebook for at least 10 years now, has done it all — from pharmaceuticals to moving her church’s accounting books from the red into the black, and is now a city treasurer — winning her town’s vote by what was close enough to a landslide victory. (All of that and she couldn’t even believe the numbers were real...)
The gist of the story is “Three brilliant African-American women at NASA -- Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) -- serve as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation's confidence, turned around the Space Race and galvanized the world.”
But that isn’t all …
NASA writes (and there IS more...) “Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and quickly advanced through high school because of her intense interest and demonstrated expertise in mathematics. She attended West Virginia State College where she graduated with highest honors in 1937 with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and French, and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia. When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, she was one of the first three African-Americans selected to desegregate West Virginia State College. After the first session, however, she decided to leave school and start a family with her husband James F. Goble. When their three daughters got older, she returned to teaching. She learned that the NACA Langley Aeronautical Laboratory was hiring a group of African-American mathematicians with teaching experience to perform mathematical calculations that transformed raw data that had been obtained using instrumentation into final engineering parameters. She began her career at Langley in the segregated West Computing section in the summer of 1953 under the supervision of fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. The pool of women mathematicians performing data reduction calculations were known as “computers.” Just two weeks into Katherine’s tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, where her position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by an encounter with wake turbulence.
…
When interviewed for the book “Hidden Figures,” Johnson discussed her activities in Project Mercury and the Apollo missions. She recalled doing trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 Mercury mission, America’s first human suborbital spaceflight. She also remembered how, in 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, the complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The network provided tracking and communications of Glenn’s spacecraft from blast off to splashdown. According to Johnson, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computers, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,” she remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space. After Project Mercury, she joined the Space Mechanics Division, and calculated the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, and computed backup navigational charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures. In 1970, Apollo 13’s aborted mission to the Moon made use of her earlier research on backup parameters and charts, enabling the crew to safely return to Earth four days later. Later in her career, as a member of the Flight Dynamics and Control Division, she worked on the Space Shuttle program, the Earth Resources Satellite, and plans for a mission to Mars. Her final projects before retirement included analysis of guidance and control of large flexible structures. When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Johnson highlights the calculations that helped synchronize Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She authored or coauthored 13 research reports during her career. Katherine Johnson retired in 1986. “
Katherine Johnson turned 100 years old in August of 2018.
SALUTE!
The Human Computers were left out of the narrative in this movie, but for Katherine Johnson, and all of the other women of color like her …
FAILURE WAS NEVER AN OPTION.
-30-
~ Black Girls Rock! at the NNSA ~
Hidden Figures: That bathroom scenario, though ... I grew up in THAT America.