Katherine Johnson was handpicked to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools at a time where segregation was still thriving. She was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918 and was interested in mathematics at an early age.
At age 13, she attended high school on the campus of historically Black West Virginia State College and enrolled in the college itself at 18. Math professor, W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics, became Johnson’s mentor leading her to success.
NASA recruited Johnson in 1962 as they prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn. This was the work she was mostly known for.
In 1957, she provided some of the math for the 1958 document, Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Later that year, NACA became NASA.
In May 1961, Johnson did a trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight.
In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. This was the first time a woman received a mention as an author in a research report in the Flight Research Division.
As NASA was preparing for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson began her work that she is mostly known for within the organization. She helped with linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Bermuda. Johnson's contributions marked a turning point in the race between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.
Johnson said her greatest success was the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. She retired in 1986, leaving her mark on space travel forever.
