“Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space. “You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it.” “Our office computed all the (rocket) trajectories,” Johnson told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012. But her work at NASA’s Langley Research Center eventually shifted to Project Mercury, the nation’s first human space program. Johnson focused on airplanes and other research at first. Signs had dictated which bathrooms the women could use. Johnson and other black women initially worked in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Virginia, that wasn’t officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Johnson was one of the “computers” who solved equations by hand during NASA’s early years and those of its precursor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement that Johnson “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color.” Johnson died Monday of natural causes at a retirement community in Newport News, Virginia, family attorney Donyale Y. Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. 24, 2015 photo, President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, while baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays looks on.
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