And it was a joy to contribute to the literature that was going to be coming out.īut you know, math is the same. I like the stars and the stories we were telling. The main thing is I liked what I was doing. Katherine Johnson, who hand-crunched the numbers for Americas first manned space flight, is 100 today NASA renamed a facility for Johnson in February 2019. I didn’t do anything alone but try to go to the root of the question – and succeeded there. 8 The family also lived with Howards wealthy and respected parents and grandparents on South Main Street in Newport News, Virginia. Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landings and the start of the Space Shuttle program. The couple moved to Newport News, Virginia, where they had six children: Ann, Maida, Leonard, Kenneth, Michael and Donald. Katherine continued to work at NASA until 1986. But when they went to computers, they called over and said, "Tell her to check and see if the computer trajectory they had calculated was correct." So I checked it, and it was correct. You could do much more, much faster on the computer. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backward and tell you when to take off." That was my forte.Įven after NASA had electronic computers, John Glenn requested that Katherine personally recheck the computer calculations before his 1962 Friendship 7 flight – the first American mission to orbit Earth. As a human computer, Katherine calculated the trajectory for astronaut Alan Shepard’s 1961 Freedom 7 mission to space – the first spaceflight for an American.Įarly on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start.
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