Could the United States have won the so-called space race against
the then Soviet Union without the help of NASA's African-American mathematician
Katherine Johnson?
By Ringo Bones
Fortunately, she got her due credit while still alive given
that her most important mathematical works were done during Jim Crow era America.
As of February 24, 2020, former NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, also
known as Katherine Goble passed away in Newport News, Virginia. Born in August
25, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, USA became well known as
America’s NASA mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics during her
employment at NASA were critical to the success of the first and subsequent
manned spaceflights.
Katherine Johnson was better known to the generation born
after the Apollo moon missions as the NASA African-American mathematician
portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures about a group of
trailblazing African American women mathematicians employed by NASA during the
start of America’s Civil Rights movement at the start of the 1960s. Although
Katherine Johnson’s mathematical work began earlier in the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics / NACA – the predecessor of NASA – back in 1953.
Before being made famous by the movie Hidden Figures in 2016, Katherine Johnson
was awarded with the Presidential Medal of freedom – America’s highest civilian
honor – by President Barack Obama in 2015.
During the early days of programmable digital computers –
whose active components of which were still largely made with subminiature vacuum tubes first manufactured
during 1947 – astronauts were not exactly keen on putting their lives in the
care of these early electronic calculating machines, which were prone to
hiccups and blackouts according to NASA. So pioneering astronaut John Glenn
asked the NASA engineers to “get the girl” – referring to Katherine Johnson to
run the computer equations by hand for improved reliability. Johnson and her
team of African American women mathematicians did vital work for NASA that
eventually made the United States won the space race by successfully landing
the first men on the moon and taking
them back safely to earth before President John F. Kennedy’s end of the 1960s
deadline.
