When John Glenn said to “get the girl,” everyone knew exactly who he meant.
It was 1962, and NASA, America’s then-fledgling space agency, was still finding its interstellar legs.
And Glenn, the country’s celebrated astronaut, was readying to slip free of the surly bonds of Earth in his Friendship 7 space capsule.
Roger that. Except for one thing.
Glenn wouldn’t just be a bolted-in passenger for this ride.
He was also actively involved in all the tabulations (coordinates, parabolas and the like) that made rockets lift off and orbits ensue.
The astronaut, as it turned out, didn’t necessarily trust the numbers chittering out of those noisy, room-sized, Univac-looking computers NASA was switching over to — so he called upon a human he could trust.
He summoned Katherine Johnson, a soft-spoken West Virginian with a mathematical universe orbiting in her brain.
It would be all systems go for Glenn, he said, but only if she squared the numbers.
A kid who counts
Johnson, who died Monday at the age of 101 at her home in neighboring Virginia, squared the numbers on that mission and lots of others, too, including the Apollo 11 flight to moon.
She grew up in Greenbrier County, a black woman who would eventually break the gravity of Jim Crow when she went to work in 1953 for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would morph into NASA.
That was four years before Sputnik and 16 before Neil Armstrong’s one small step on the Earth’s sister planet.
Johnson was classified as a “human computer,” a then-lowly position in 1953, despite the lofty math skills it required.
Never mind that she was an elite mathematician tasked with making sure it all added up, literally.
After all, a botched equation or misplaced decimal point could translate to a catastrophic explosion on the launch pad — or fiery death in a flawed re-entry.
As kid in the Mountain State, numbers were her world. She was compelled to count and categorize.
Everything.
The steps from her house to the main road in White Sulphur Springs, where she was born in 1918, for example.
The numbers of dishes — plates, bowls, saucers, knives, forks, spoons, ladles, all by category — she launched into soapy water as part of her chores, as another.
Her father knew there wasn’t much he or other people of color could count on in West Virginia in the 1920s, though.
He wanted more for his daughter, so he relocated his family 120 miles south to the town of Institute, which had a black high school.
Johnson entered that high school at 10, and was a 14-year-old freshman at the all-back West Virginia State University.
She turned her tassel four years after that, an 18-year-old summa cum laude graduate in the Class of 1937, with degrees in math and French.
A year after that, she was defying gravity in Morgantown, on the WVU campus.
Thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier, she was able to become the first black female graduate student in school history.
She married and moved to Virginia, where she taught school and raised her kids. Hopes of a bigger paycheck prompted her launch into the space business.
Hidden, no more
For decades, very few people outside of that business knew of her accomplishments.
“Hidden Figures,” the book and Hollywood movie of the same name, changed her whole trajectory.
Last summer, on a sun-splashed day before the Fourth of July, the burnished chrome letters of her name glinted like a Saturn rocket on Launch Pad 39A.
If you knew where to look, you could spy them along the highway in South Fairmont.
NASA renamed its Independent Verification and Validation facility in her honor.
Quite fitting, agency officials said, since its technicians square the numbers on all the hardware and software that goes into the crafts that explore space.
Johnson, who could no longer travel, wasn’t there, but her daughter, Joylette Hylick, was.
After all the speeches, Hylick stayed in her orbit.
She was approached by Anna Brusoe, a 14-year-old robotics kid from Morgantown with a trajectory on aerospace engineering.
Anna shook Hylick’s hand and said, “Your mom is amazing.”
“Well, I’m going to tell her about you,” Katherine Johnson’s daughter said.
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