Hidden Figures Hero Katherine Johnson Reminded Us That Space Was Never Safe From America ’s Worst Impulses

Katherine Johnson performed what might have been the most important job of her life backwards—because backwards was exactly the right way to do it. The job was figuring out how to ensure that John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, would splash down in the Atlantic as close as possible to the recovery team that would be awaiting him. So Johnson—the legendary NASA “computer,” or mathematician, who was made famous by the book and movie Hidden Figures and who died at 101 on Monday—simply reverse-engineered the entire mission, from desired landing point, back through three orbits and onto the launch pad. “Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start,” she told NASA in a 2008 interview. “I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.” Johnson, of course, was only one of a host of great mathematical minds who made NASA’s early history such a success, but it was both her race and gender—she was an African-American woman, working in a white, male field—that helped make her tale both compelling and best-selling. She started at NASA five years before it even became NASA in 1958, having taken a job with the precursor National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) back in 1953. John Glenn,...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Ed Dwight Hidden Fighres History Katherine Johnson NASA Race Racism Space Source Type: news