#Katherine johnson nasa still alive full#

#Katherine johnson nasa still alive full#

There, Johnson performed the NASA calculations that made possible the manned space missions of the early 1960s as well as the 1969 moon landing.Įven astronaut John Glenn put his full faith in Johnson, requesting she re-do all-electronic computer calculations before he embarked on his 1962 Earth orbits. Just weeks after Katherine Johnson began a position as one of Langley Research Center's human computers in 1952, supervisors transferred the summa cum laude West Virginia State College graduate (with degrees in both mathematics and French) from the African American computing pool to the flight research division. Neil Armstrong's 'one small step for man' may not have happened without this woman. Katherine Johnson poses for a portrait at work at NASA Langley Research Center in 1966 Getty Images Here are 10 of the women who used their brains to skyrocket to the top of their fields. Of course, Black women’s contributions aren’t limited to NASA.

(Shetterly’s estimate was in the thousands.) While there are no official numbers on how many women filled these roles over the years, experts have estimated there were several hundred over the years. Roosevelt signed a 1941 executive order into law that prohibited racial, religious and ethnic discrimination in the country’s defense injury, thus paving the way for these “hidden figures’” advancements. These works told the stories of the women of color largely hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, later NASA) during World War II to work as “human computers,” manually crunching numbers, filling the many vacancies left by those fighting the war overseas. NASA scientists including Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson began to get some overdue credit, however, when author Margot Lee Shetterly released her 2016 tome, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race.Ī film adaptation with the shortened title, Hidden Figures, hit theaters the same year to great acclaim, earning three Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. The issue, however, is that the contributions these brilliant pioneers made largely went unnoticed. Even so, many overcome their adverse circumstances, making invaluable contributions to the scientific community, particularly in the United States Space Program.

Throughout history, Black women have faced the uphill battles of both racial and gender biases, especially in male-dominated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields.