Before she rose
She worked at NASA's predecessor for years in a segregated computing pool — where Black mathematicians worked separately, used separate bathrooms, and ate in separate cafeterias.
The "computers" — women who performed calculations by hand — were essential to NASA's operations. The Black women in the computing pool were essential but invisible: separated by race, unacknowledged in reports, absent from records. Katherine Johnson forced her way into engineering meetings by simply refusing to stop attending them.
1918–2020 · White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, USA
She calculated the trajectory that sent humans to the moon. For decades, NASA's records didn't even list her name.
Everything is physics and math.
— Katherine Johnson
In 1962, John Glenn refused to board the Friendship 7 spacecraft until Katherine Johnson had personally verified the computer's orbital calculations by hand. He had flown in WWII, trained for years as an astronaut, and trusted the most sophisticated machinery NASA had. But for the numbers that would bring him home, he wanted Katherine Johnson's hand. She verified the calculations. He flew. He came home.
Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for the 1961 Freedom 7 flight — Alan Shepard's historic first American human spaceflight.
She also calculated the trajectories for the Apollo 11 mission that landed Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969.
She attended project briefings — where women were not expected. When told women didn't go to those meetings, she asked why.
No one had a good answer. She kept going. She said later: "I just asked permission and I went."
Katherine Johnson graduated from West Virginia State College at 18 — summa cum laude, with degrees in mathematics and French.
She was selected as one of the first three Black students to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools in 1939.
The 2016 film "Hidden Figures" brought her story to 70 million viewers. She was 97 when she saw it.
She said she did not feel she had been hidden. She had always known her work was important. The world had simply taken a while to look.
She worked until she was 97. She said she loved her work so much that she never thought of it as work.
Find the thing you love enough that retirement never makes sense. That is the work.
What she taught us
Everything is physics and math.
— Katherine Johnson, Katherine Johnson
Her story. Your life.
A question worth sitting with
Katherine Johnson simply kept asking to attend the meetings where decisions were made — and eventually no one stopped her. What room are you not in that you need to be in — and what would it take for you to simply walk through the door?
Take sixty seconds. Just sit with it.
A letter from her — to you
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