She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s
May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first
human spaceflight.
She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s
May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first
human spaceflight.
The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik
changed history—and Katherine Johnson’s life.
In
1957, Katherine provided some of the math for the
1958 document
Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a
series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the
Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft
Research Division
(PARD).
Engineers from those groups formed the core
of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official
foray into space travel, and Katherine, who had
worked with
many of them since coming to Langley, “came along
with the program” as the NACA became NASA later
that year.
She did trajectory analysis for Alan
Shepard’s May
1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human
spaceflight.
In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski
coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at
Burnout for
Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position,
a report laying out the equations describing an
orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of
the spacecraft is
specified.
It was the first time a woman in the
Flight Research Division had received credit as an
author of a research report.
In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission
of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon
to do the work that she would become most known
for.
The
complexity of the orbital flight had required the
construction of a worldwide communications
network, linking tracking stations around the world
to IBM computers
in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda.
The computers had been programmed with the
orbital equations that would control the trajectory
of the capsule
in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to
splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of
putting their lives in the care of the electronic
calculating machines,
which were prone to hiccups and blackouts.
As a
part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked
engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to
run the same
numbers through the same equations that had been
programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her
desktop mechanical calculating machine.
“If she
says
they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the
astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s
flight was a success, and marked a turning point in
the
competition between the United States and the
Soviet Union in space.
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