Secret Space Hero

When you think of early space pioneers, astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin may come to mind. They were the first people to walk on the moon in 1969. But the moon landing wouldn’t have been possible without Katherine Johnson—a woman you may not have heard about. 

Johnson was a mathematician at NASA, the U.S. space agency. During her 30-year career, she calculated trajectories, or paths of flying objects, that sent rockets into space and eventually put astronauts on the moon. Johnson’s contributions to the space program were extraordinary, especially considering the world she lived in. As an African-American born in West Virginia in 1918, Johnson grew up during a time of racial segregation in the South. African-Americans were forced to attend separate schools, drink from separate water fountains, and use separate bathrooms from white people.

But despite this oppression, Johnson’s talents wouldn’t stay hidden. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the U.S. space agency hired dozens of black female mathematicians, including Johnson. These women calculated solutions to the complex engineering problems involved in designing, testing, and flying planes and spacecraft. This month, they will get the recognition they deserve in a new movie called Hidden Figures, based on a book of the same name.

Johnson loved math from a young age. After finishing high school at 14, she enrolled at West Virginia State College. She took every math class the school offered. 

Following college, Johnson became a math teacher. Then in 1952, she heard that the U.S. space agency was hiring women to perform flight calculations. Today, computers do this type of work. But back then, computers weren’t yet available. NASA instead relied on human computers—people with simple mechanical calculators and math smarts. Johnson leapt at the chance and was hired.  

When Johnson began working at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, though, she had to sit apart from white women who did the same job. Johnson’s colleagues quickly noticed her talent. Soon she was selected to work with a group that included white men and women who would go on to explore the possibility of space fight. 

Eventually, Johnson’s new job focused on determining the exact path a spacecraft would travel from takeoff to touchdown. This required an understanding of projectile motion—the curved path of an object moving through the air.

Johnson considers her work on the moon mission her greatest contribution to the space program. The Apollo 11 astronauts had only a small window of time in which to reconnect their lander with the spacecraft orbiting the moon. It was Johnson’s job to figure out the precise rendezvous time so the crew could return home to Earth.

Johnson stayed at NASA until 1986, when she retired. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her achievements. Last year, NASA named a new building after Johnson at Langley. Now 98, Johnson says she’s proud of her groundbreaking place in history: 

“I went to work happy every day for 33 years.”