Almanac of Story Tellers: Katherine Johnson

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Aug. 26th

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    It is the 238th day of the year, leaving 127 days remaining in 2022. 

 

Katherine Johnson receives the
 Presidential Medal of Freedom from
President Obama in 2015.

    On this date in 1918, the mathematician Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.

    She told her stories through numbers she calculated by hand. Her computations helped put Americans in space and helped land a man on the moon. They assured that the Apollo 13 crew could return safely to Earth even after its oxygen tank failed.

    In 1960, while working at NASA, Johnson wrote a scientific paper on the calculations for putting a spacecraft into orbit. It was the first time a woman -- and a Black woman at that -- received credit for such a report.

    Johnson's work went far beyond writing or co-writing 26 reports in her 33-year career at NASA. 

    She was responsible for calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, the U.S.A.'s first attempts to put people into outer space. She continued such work on Apollo missions, which included calculating rendezvous paths for the command module and the lunar-landing module on flights to the moon.

    She worked with groups of women who were called computers -- because in those days, the complex calculations had to be done by hand, with pencil and paper. They needed to take into account the gravitational effect of other celestial bodies, along with the location of Earth, other planets, and the stars. 

     Even when electronic computers were used in the early days, astronauts wanted assurances that Johnson had checked the results. John Glenn, the first American to fly in orbit around the Earth, insisted that Johnson personally verify his flight path.

    Later in her career, she worked on Space Shuttle missions, and on planned spaceflights to Mars.

    The public knew little about her until early in the 21st Century. In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures told the story of her life and of the women who worked alongside her.

    Johnson died in 2020 in Newport News, Va. She was 101