She was cheered on in this by the astronauts whose lives were in her hands, one of whom assured her: “I’ll take Kate’s hunches anytime.” The high-stakes nature of the work was compounded by its sheer novelty forced, quite literally, to write the first textbook on lunar landings, Katherine Johnson and her colleagues often had to rely on instinct.
Katherine Johnson’s job was to calculate the trajectories that would put a craft into lunar orbit, drop a lander safely on to the Moon’s surface, and return the mission to Earth.
As a further reassurance, Katherine Johnson also produced navigational charts for astronauts to use in the event of a systems failure.īy the time of the Apollo mission to the Moon, in 1969, the mathematical tasks involved had become rather more complicated. Glenn had asked for her personally, as he doubted the ability of Nasa’s enormous, newly purchased mechanical computer to do the job. She went on to plot the trajectory for John Glenn’s complete orbit around the Earth in 1962. The calculations for this mission, Katherine Johnson recalled, were “Easy … it was just a matter of shooting him up and having him come back down. In 1958, the same year that Naca became Nasa, Katherine Johnson secured a promotion to the administration’s all-white, all-male Space Task Force, which was gearing up to launch the first American citizen, Alan Shepard, into orbit. Many, Katherine Johnson included, were black women, hired in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in the national defence industry. In the days before sophisticated computer programmes, these human “computers” relied on such basic tools as slide rules and graph paper to crunch their data.
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The centre was run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (Naca), the precursor to Nasa, which had pursued a policy of hiring women since the 1930s – in part to free up male aeronautical engineers for other research projects. Katherine Johnson, who has died aged 101, was the human “computer” charged with calculating the paths of the flights that sent Americans into space and – eventually – put Neil Armstrong on the Moon.Īt the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, she was one of a team of young female mathematicians, many of them former teachers, who performed the time-consuming calculations that determined a spacecraft’s orbit trajectory.
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