The small town had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, she told The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1997.Įach September, her father drove Johnson and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school and college on the campus of the historically black West Virginia State College. Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, near the Virginia border. Jackson and Vaughan had died in 20 respectively. In 2017, Johnson was brought on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony to thunderous applause. The film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and grossed more than $200 million worldwide. Johnson was portrayed in the film by actress Taraji P. The “Hidden Figures” book and film followed, telling the stories of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, among others.
But in 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson - then 97 - the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Johnson and her co-workers had been relatively unsung heroes of America’s Space Race. She also worked on the Space Shuttle program before retiring in 1986.
Her calculations helped the lunar lander rendezvous with the orbiting command service module. Johnson considered her work on the Apollo moon missions to be her greatest contribution to space exploration. It’s a loss felt deeply by her family as well.Īstrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a short video to Twitter on the important contributions made by Katherine Johnson and her “computer” colleagues: Thank you Katherine Johnson, and thank you also to her family. I’m so glad she lived to see the recognition that she and her fellow “Hidden Figures” so rightly deserved for their important work on the space program.įormer NASA astronaut Captain Mark Kelly Tweeted: “They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.”Īstronaut Anne McClain Tweeted: We fly on the shoulders of giants. Mark Warner Tweeted: I’m mourning the loss of Katherine Johnson, who passed away today at the age of 101. “She gave us a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history.” “The wonderful gift that Katherine Johnson gave us is that her story shined a light on the stories of so many other people,” Shetterly said Monday. Shetterly told the AP that Johnson was “exceptional in every way.” “It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work,” Shetterly wrote. “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” on which the film is based. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space.
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“You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it.” “Our office computed all the (rocket) trajectories,” Johnson told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012. But her work at NASA’s Langley Research Center eventually shifted to Project Mercury, the nation’s first human space program. Johnson focused on airplanes and other research at first. Signs had dictated which bathrooms the women could use. Johnson and other black women initially worked in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Virginia, that wasn’t officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Johnson was one of the “computers” who solved equations by hand during NASA’s early years and those of its precursor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement that Johnson “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color.”
Johnson died Monday of natural causes at a retirement community in Newport News, Virginia, family attorney Donyale Y. Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. 24, 2015 photo, President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, while baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays looks on.
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