If you’re traveling on Interstate 79 around South Fairmont and you time it right, you’ll see it: The Katherine Johnson IV&V NASA facility, at I-79 Technology Park.
A highway glimpse is only fleeting, though.
Up close, the letters in burnished chrome glint in the sun just like a Saturn rocket on Launch Pad 39A, at the facility that puts a signature on every current or planned mission to the stars.
If there isn’t an All Systems Go from the facility bearing her name, there’s no launch.
Johnson, a softspoken Greenbrier County native who had to attend segregated schools because of the color of her skin, was an elite mathematician who worked as a “human computer” for NASA.
NASA renamed the facility in her honor in 2019, one day before the Fourth of July.
It was Johnson who figured launch trajectories for the pioneering Mercury space flights and, most notably, the Apollo 11 mission to the moon — as America embarked on a golden age of space exploration.
Stefanie P. Hines doesn’t know if there are any future space pioneers among a group of 16 junior high students from Baltimore who touched down at WVU this week.
She just wants them to tap into some energy of which they may not be aware.
The students, who are Black, are orbiting the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design for “The Energy, Environment and Excitement (E3) Camp,” which runs through Saturday.
With 23 majors ranging from agribusiness management to fashion merchandising to wood science and technology, the college housed on the Evansdale campus is one of WVU’s more diverse.
Diversity has long been in the wheelhouse of Hines, who teaches in the energy land management program at Davis.
She has a multinational lineage.
Her grandparents came to the U.S. from their native China after World War II.
After earning a law degree from WVU, though, their granddaughter changed her trajectory.
Hines, a Mountain State native, eventually nixed the court room to go to work in the oil and gas exploration industry in Texas and Pennsylvania.
No matter the job, she was always tapped to coordinate some kind of diversity and inclusion initiative, even if it just meant the offering Spanish lessons during lunchtime.
She helped recruit employees with an eye toward diversity in her first-ever job in the field, in fact.
Take me home …
This week’s E3 camp is an outgrowth of those experiences, she said.
“So many kids know about becoming doctors and lawyers,” she said, “but there really are worlds of opportunities out there.”
For kids of color, those worlds can be figurative universes away.
Just 7% of those who work in computer science are Black. Same for the 5% of the workforce in engineering.
That’s according to the most-recent numbers from the Pew Research Center, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Hines came up with the idea of a camp focusing on opportunities in the energy industry during the pandemic.
She drew on her contacts across Texas and Pennsylvania for corporate sponsorships, meaning all the activities are free of charge to the participants, who also come away with contacts of their own, for future internships and chances for mentors down the road.
Like a geologic rock formation that might be home to oil reserves or natural gas deposits, there was a second layer to it all, she said.
Traditionally underrepresented minority groups from the urban climes would have the experience of both the Davis College and WVU, she said — while also taking in the natural beauty of Appalachia and all the quirks and charms a university town can vector out.
“We’re doing lots of field trips,” Hines said. “These kids are going to find out that Morgantown is a pretty cool place.”
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