Remembering Katherine Johnson

It was February 1962. The Space Race was in full swing, with the U.S. eager to overtake the Soviet Union. NASA was preparing for the orbital flight of John Glenn. The mission, known as Friendship 7, relied on a “new” electronic computer, the IBM 7090, to plan the capsule’s trajectory from takeoff to splashdown. Glenn — skeptical about trusting the machine — asked for a specific person to double check the computer’s computations by hand. “If she says they’re good,” Glenn said, “then I’m ready to go.”

“She” was Katherine Johnson, one of NASA’s premier mathematicians. Her work matched the computer’s work exactly and gave Glenn the confidence to go forward. As a result, Glenn went on to orbit the planet three times, stay aloft for nearly five hours and safely reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. The Friendship 7 mission — and Johnson’s contributions to it — helped propel the U.S. ahead in the Space Race.

Johnson’s efforts underpinned NASA’s most critical endeavors during her 33 year career. Prior to Friendship 7, she calculated the path for the nation’s first human space flight. In 1969, she worked on the precise trajectories that let Apollo 11 land on the moon and return to Earth. Johnson was originally hired as a “human computer” — a job mostly done by women who performed manual aerospace calculations — and did her most important work in the Flight Research Division.

Johnson, who passed away on February 24, will be remembered as the first black person to join the Flight Research Division, the first woman to attend NASA’s scientific briefings and the first woman at NASA to get credit as an author of a research report. Yet with all the praise that she received later in life, she remained humble about her accomplishments. In an interview with NASA in 2017, she said: “I was excited at something new, but gave credit to everybody who helped. I didn’t do anything alone.”

I think about Johnson’s philosophy towards work — liking her job, working hard, focusing on the team and giving credit. These are necessary traits for great leaders in the modern age. There are many lenses through which we can view Johnson’s legacy — brilliant mathematician, space pioneer, role model — but I am most struck by Johnson, the leader, whose approach is all the more relevant today.