This is how you write a book.
After the speeches and the requisite cutting of the ribbon with the giant, movie-prop scissors, Anna Brusoe stayed in orbit, long enough for an audience.
“Your mom’s amazing,” the then-14-year-old said, as she shook the hand of Joylette Hylick.
No one in the world was going to disagree with the Morgantown teen on this sunny morning of July 2, 2019.
Fifty years to that day — July 2, 1969 — Hylick’s mother, the West Virginia hidden-figure mathematician Katherine Johnson, was hunkered over a slide rule.
Patiently and methodically, she was vectoring out the launch and landing trajectories of the upcoming Apollo 11 mission that would make its giant leap for mankind weeks later.
Back to this morning, a half-century into the future, the burnished, chrome letters of Johnson’s name glinted in the sun like a Saturn rocket on Launch Pad 39A, as Anna waited her turn to say hello.
NASA was renaming its Independent Verification & Validation center in South Fairmont, Marion County, in Johnson’s honor — and Anna wasn’t going to miss it.
Other girls idolize young women who become music stars, but for Anna, the female she first looked up to was Johnson, who earned her elevated status by way of STEM: the science, technology, engineering and mathematics pathway that was once closed to generations of the gender.
Especially women of color.
Johnson, who was born in 1918 in Greenbrier County, had to go to an all-Black high school 120 miles from her hometown of White Sulphur Springs, because that was the closest one to her and the only one society at the time said she could attend.
Then, she went to an all-Black college — amazingly, as a 14-year-old freshman — again, because that institution was only one society at the time said she could attend.
As a mathematician and “human computer” for NASA, Johnson once famously assured John Glenn that the numbers attached to his upcoming space flight checked out fine.
The charismatic astronaut, you see, had no intentions of climbing into his Freedom 7 capsule until Johnson said he could.
“What responsibility Katherine Johnson had,” Anna said. “What an accomplishment. What a story.”
Other orbits
That’s why Anna, who is now 16 and a home-schooled high school junior in Morgantown, retold it.
Her book, “Reaching for the Stars,” is geared to elementary school-aged readers and includes profiles of Johnson and four other female STEM pioneers who changed the way we regard the cosmos.
She also illustrated the 40-page work, while including a glossary of terms and a punctuation guide.
Anna first learned of Johnson through “Hidden Figures,” the book and Hollywood movie of the same name that, as said, made the soft-spoken math whiz a reluctant star.
The professional lives of the four other women Anna features in her book, however, you may not know — but their trajectories are just as bright.
There’s Vietnamese-born Jane Luu, who fled the fall of Saigon in 1975 with her family as a little girl and would grow up to co-discover the Kuiper Belt just past the reach of Neptune, an orbital ring of icy rocks where comets and asteroids are formed.
Mary Golda Ross, who was born in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, crossed universes of all kinds when Lockheed hired her, as a Native American woman and engineer, to help design and improve its P-38 fighter planes in World War II.
In 1993, Ellen Ochoa became the first Hispanic women in space on the Discovery shuttle. She would later log more than 1,000 hours on orbital missions before becoming the first Hispanic director of the Johnson Space Center.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin conquered the societal orbit that once discouraged young women from going into science on the way to her discovery that changed everything: that the sun is compromised mainly of hydrogen and most of the universe is, too.
All systems go
“Reach for the Stars” came out in December, with funding from the Girl Scouts of America, which has helped distribute the book to locales as far-flung as rural Appalachia, inner-city Detroit and South America.
It has already been translated to Spanish, and while it was initially self-published, its author wants to change that.
She sees picking up a publishing house, in order to do other profiles and other editions, for a wider readership on the event horizon.
“I think it can keep going,” the author said.
Meanwhile, schools and organizations interested in receiving electronic copies may email reachingforthestars.projectnews@gmail.com for more information.
We have liftoff
Because the women she profiled kept going, she wants readers of her book to do the same.
Anna is already taking dual-credit courses in calculus at WVU, and she just received a national 2022 STEM in Action Award from Society Women Engineers for her advocacy of the pursuit.
The latter already puts her in elite company, as she was just one of 25 young women across the U.S. to be recognized.
That doesn’t mean, though, that she’s locked into a self-imposed orbit.
She has a world full of hobbies that don’t require a rocket to access. She’s a classically trained pianist, and isn’t above flipping the switch on her brain to initiate the Gloriously Goofy sequence with her friends.
She wants the little girls who read her book to learn and realize that the pursuit of knowledge and the act of simply living on this blue planet in the midst of all those stars, all those solar systems and all that Everything … is, well, wondrous.
“Don’t stop learning and don’t stop striving, no matter what you’re interested in,” she said. “The world’s a big place.”
On July 2, 2019, Katherine Johnson was a world-arcing 100 years old. Her age and health had grounded her back home in Virginia, but Joylette Hylick happily attended in her mother’s stead for the honor of the NASA renaming ceremony.
When Anna shook her hand and said, “Your mom’s amazing,” Hylick beamed, and took the time to talk.
“Well, I’m going to tell her about you,” Katherine Johnson’s daughter said.
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