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, perhaps the country’s most celebrated astronaut at the time, 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 (drag, weight, parabolas and the like) that make 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 only recently switching over to — so he called upon a human he could trust.
He was asking for the expertise of a soft-spoken West Virginian with a mathematical universe swirling in her brain.
It would be all systems go, he said, but only if Katherine Johnson squared the numbers, first.
Ready for takeoff
As part of Black History Month observances, WVU is presenting a one-hour webinar discussion on the life and times of the pioneering NASA mathematician who conquered the gravity of Jim Crow along the way.
Zoom is carrying the online event, which is from 5-6 p.m. Tuesday.
Click on https://wvu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9mEhBCrtRiiZobs5XFswGg to register.
WVU’s Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources is partnering with the university’s Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on the webinar.
The aim of the joint mission is to also honor those of the same gender who followed Johnson’s orbit – after her professional launch into a society then programmed to keep women, Black women, in particular, simply grounded.
Panelists include Meshea L. Poore, an attorney and former state lawmaker who is vice president of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and Kerri Knotts, a Statler alumnae who spent two decades working in engineering and senior leadership roles at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Countdown sequence initiated
Johnson, who died last February at the age of 101, squared the numbers on the Friendship 7 mission and lots of others, too, including the Apollo 11 flight to the moon.
She grew up in Greenbrier County, and, like a lot of pioneers, didn’t necessarily realize she was one at first.
The woman for whom numbers came naturally 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.
And, one year before Brown v. the Board.
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 a 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-Black 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.
To boldly go …
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.
Two years ago, on a sun-splashed afternoon two days before the Fourth of July, the burnished chrome letters of Johnson’s 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 now going into the crafts that explore space.
Johnson, who by then could no longer travel, wasn’t there, but her daughter, Joylette Hylick, was.
After all the speeches, Hylick stayed in her orbit, talking about her mother’s humility (not surprising), and her sharp sense of humor (which was).
Anna Brusoe, a then 14-year-old robotics kid from Morgantown with a trajectory on aerospace engineering, hung back until the crowd thinned.
Then she approached.
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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