Her trailblazing contributions were celebrated at the dedication ceremony where Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures and keynote speaker, said of the " human computers": “We are living in a present that they willed into existence with their pencils, their slide rules, their mechanical calculating machines - and, of course, their brilliant minds. Johnson's humble response to a building named after her was said with a laugh: “You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy.” Johnson’s character and accomplishments than this building that will bear her name.” “I can’t imagine a better tribute to Mrs. “We’re here to honor the legacy of one of the most admired and inspirational people ever associated with NASA,” Langley Director David Bowles said in a press release. Johnson, her family and friends were at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new building which is part of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Henson as Johnson.Ī year later, in September 2017, 99-year-old Johnson was honored by NASA, with the dedication of a new research building which is named after her - the Katherine G. Turned into an Oscar-nominated feature film, Hidden Figures (2016), starring actress Taraji P. In November 2015, President Barack Obama presented Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race celebrated the little-known story of Johnson and her fellow African American computers.
Yet, the job wasn't considered complete until Johnson was summoned to check the work of the machines, providing the go-ahead to propel John Glenn into successful orbit in 1962. This involved far more difficult calculations, to account for the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies, and by then NASA had begun using electronic computers. The next challenge was to send a man in orbit around Earth. ' " As a result, the task of plotting the path for Alan Shepard's 1961 journey to space, the first in American history, fell on her shoulders.
You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off. "Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. Johnson.įor Johnson, calculating space flight came down to the basics of geometry: "The early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point," she said. As a NASA employee, Katherine Johnson had to work hard to balance her work and her family but also keep up with the speed of needing to complete her calculations in short period of time. The following year she remarried, to decorated Navy and Army officer James A.
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In 1958, after NACA was reformulated into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Johnson was among the people charged with determining how to get a human into space and back.
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