![]() ![]() She pushed her way into briefings traditionally attended only by men and secured a place in the inner circle of the American Space Program. She worked there for years until the Soviet satellite Sputnik kicked off the space race between the US and the USSR, spurring the transformation of NACA into America’s space agency, NASA. After just two weeks, she transferred to the facility’s Flight Research Division. She started in in the segregated West Area Computing Group in 1953 under Dorothy Vaughan. When she learned of a job opening at Langley for black women with math degrees she and her husband moved their three daughters to Newport News, Virginia. Like many women of her time she became a teacher – but her sights were set on becoming a research mathematician. It paid off and she graduated from high school at 14 and graduated from West Virginia State in 1937 at 18. Recognizing their youngest daughter’s talent for math, her parents sent her to high school on the campus of West Virginia State Institute, a black college 100 miles away. Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where education for black people ended in eighth grade. Here’s more about Johnson and her colleagues: As she said in a 2010 interview, “We always worked as a team. In interviews ever since, Johnson has resisted taking full credit for the work. But there was no denying the value of their contribution. ![]() For years the women occupied a segregated wing, “West Area Computing,” and used separate facilities. Computers were so new that even people at NASA were skeptical of them, and Glenn requested that Johnson personally confirm its calculations before his trip three times around Earth.Ī day and a half later, she proved the computer right.Ĭonsidered more patient and detail-oriented than men (and they could be paid less), the first women were hired in 1935 to do the integral but time-consuming work of reading, calculating and plotting test data to free up engineers for research projects.įollowing an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in the defense industry, Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, NACA’s main research center, began recruiting black people with college degrees in the 1940s for the computer pool. Johnson’s work was held in such high regard in its time that Glenn, who died on Thursday, was aware of it. Henson stars as Katherine Johnson, the 2015 National Medal of Freedom recipient who calculated the trajectory for America’s first trip to space with Alan Shepherd’s 1961 mission Spencer as Johnson’s supervisor, Dorothy Vaughan and Monáe as Mary Jackson, who rose from mathematician to engineer to the mentor for women and minorities.Ī pivotal scene in the film features Glenn. The film is based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book by the same name, which spans several decades and characters at Langley. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, tells the story of three women from the pool. Their work barely earned a mention in pop culture space tributes until this year, thanks to a best-selling novel and a forthcoming film that’s getting major Oscar buzz. Black women played a crucial role in the pool, providing mathematical data for NASA’s first successful space missions, including Glenn’s pioneering orbital spaceflight. That’s right: humans, namely women, comprised the workforce known as the “ Computer Pool” before the arrival of electronic data processors, aka, computers in the 1960s. It wasn’t long before then that the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, used “ computers in skirts” to do all the number-crunching. By the time NASA was preparing to send John Glenn into space computers were used to calculate launch conditions.
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