JOHNSON, KATHERINE (26 August 1918–24 February 2020), American mathematician integral to the success of the first and subsequent NASA space flights. From a young age, Johnson was intensely curious and brilliant. By eighteen, she had enrolled herself in West Virginia State College. At this historically black university, she was mentored by W.W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics in the United States. In 1937 she graduated with the highest honors and began teaching at a Black public school in Marion, Virginia. In 1939 Johnson was selected alongside two men as the first Black student offered positions to attend West Virginia University, where she briefly enrolled in the graduate mathematics program. In the summer of 1953, Johnson began work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) Langley Research Center, which included a segregated all-Black computing section.
When the NACA became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, Johnson was part of a core group dedicated to space travel. Despite the economic inequality she faced as a woman (not to mention as a Black woman working in the segregated South) in both title and salary, Johnson was considered an equal by her colleagues. She produced analysis for NASA’s historic May 1961 Freedom 7 mission, America’s first successful human spaceflight. In 1960, with engineer Ted Skopinski, she co-authored a complex report on orbital spaceflight landing positions, becoming the first woman in NASA’s Flight Research Division to receive credit as the author of a research report. In her career, she also crucially supported the orbital mission of Friendship 7, manually checking, over a period of weeks, calculations that had been solved electronically by computers at the request of astronaut John Glenn, who trusted her work over IBM’s. Her other accomplishments and contributions to space exploration included support for Project Apollo’s Lunar Module, the Space Shuttle, and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (Landsat), as well as calculations that were integral to the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. At NASA, she authored more than two dozen reports and retired in 1986. Although she was more or less publicly unacknowledged in her own time, in 2015, at the age of ninety-seven, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.