Hidden Figures

Katherine Johnson was born Katherine Coleman in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her father was a farmer and then worked as a bellman at the famous Greenbrier resort. A precocious student, Katherine started college as a 15-year-old. Her mentor there had a PhD in math from the University of Pennsylvania and recognized her talent. He pushed her to excel, creating tailor-made classes for her in high-level math. She later began a master’s degree program but left after one semester, when she and her husband learned they were expecting a child.

Now Katherine Goble, she began teaching when her children were older, then applied and got accepted to Langley. Soon after she started working in West Computing in 1953, she was assigned to a short-term project in the Flight Research Division. Six months later, she was still there and the position became permanent. She was well liked and respected by her colleagues for both her sharp mind and her obvious enthusiasm and curiosity. She avoided the segregated facilities at Langley by simply using the white restrooms without making a fuss and bringing her own lunch to eat at her desk.

She endured personal tragedy when her husband died in 1956. Eventually she would meet and marry another man, and she then became known as Katherine Johnson. Professionally, she soared. She worked on the trajectories of orbital flight, authoring a report called “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position” that “went through ten months of editorial meetings, analysis, recommendations, and revisions before publication in September 1960—the first report to come out of Langley’s Aerospace Mechanics Division (or its predecessor, the Flight Research Division) by a female author” (192).

Her position also allowed her to participate directly in the space program in the 1960s. She calculated the trajectories for Project Mercury flights, including that of Alan Shepard, who became the first American in space. In addition, it was Katherine who manually checked the calculations of an electronic computer for John Glenn’s orbit of Earth in 1962. At the end of the decade, she calculated the trajectory for the lunar module to rendezvous with the command module orbiting above the Moon on Apollo 11, a mission that fulfilled President Kennedy’s vision.

She continued her work at NASA into the 1980s, contributing to the space shuttle program until her retirement in 1986. She was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015, and died in early 2020, at age 101.

Mary Jackson (née Winston) was a Hampton native who graduated from Hampton Institute with a double major in math and science. After teaching for a year in Maryland, she returned to her hometown and worked at the USO. She began working at West Computing in 1951. A chance meeting with Kazimierz (“Kaz”) Czarnecki, an engineer with the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, led to her going to work for him in 1953. Kaz encouraged her to become an engineer through Langley’s training program. She would need to take extra courses, offered at area schools including Hampton High School. Because of segregation laws in Virginia, she was barred from the school and had to obtain special permission from the city to attend the necessary classes. She went on to become NASA’s first female African American engineer in 1958.

Mary continued to work with Kaz until his retirement in 1979, adding FORTRAN programming to her list of accomplishments that decade. Clear-eyed about her future after Kaz retired, she made a big change for the twilight of her career. The position of Federal Women’s Program Manager opened up in human resources and Mary took the job. She saw it as a unique way of helping to ensure opportunities for future female employees. She was always involved in service-type volunteer work—from her old college sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha to the Girl Scouts—and this was another way of giving back. She retired in 1985 and died in 2005.