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Jenny Howard, Ecology - Wake Forest University observes, John Glenn wouldn’t blast off until she double-checked the IBM’s calculations.
Photo: Matteo Farinella
You probably know the name Katherine G. Johnson from the popular book-turned-movie “Hidden Figures.” In the film, Johnson (played by actress Taraji P. Henson) is the protagonist who double-checks the numbers produced by the newly installed IBM computer before the astronaut, John Glenn, launches into space. She was pretty badass in the movie. In real life, she was even more incredible.
Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, WV. She turned 100 on August 26, 2018. Johnson left her mark as a brilliant woman working as a human computer during the space race in the 1950s and ’60s. On top of that, her charismatic personality and life story make her all the more endearing: an African-American girl from rural West Virginia, she counted her way to reach the stars...
In 1960, she co-authored a report with a NASA engineer, the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author for a research report. She calculated the trajectory for America’s first crewed trip to space with Alan Shepherd in 1961 and did all the calculations for the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.
But she was most famous for her work on the 1962 orbital mission by John Glenn. Langley had recently acquired their first IBM computer and it was programmed to calculate the trajectory of Glenn’s orbit from take-off to splashdown. But the new computer was still prone to some hiccups, making the astronauts hesitant to trust the computer’s calculated trajectory. Glenn specifically requested that Johnson perform the same calculations as the computer, but by hand. She remembers him saying, “Get the girl to check the numbers…if she says the numbers are good, I’m ready to go.”
It took her a day and a half to perform the calculations, but the numbers matched. Glenn’s flight was a success, marking a turning point in the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. Her calculations – by hand – of complex mathematical equations helped get space heroes like Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong into space - and more important to her - successfully home.
Source: Massive Science
