She computed the trajectories that put men on the moon — and had to fight to be in the room where it happened.
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician at NACA and NASA whose orbital mechanics calculations were so trusted that John Glenn refused to launch until she personally verified the computer's numbers.
Working in a segregated "colored computing" pool before breaking into all-white, all-male flight research teams, she combined an almost supernatural gift for analytic geometry with the dogged determination to attend the briefings, author the reports, and receive the credit that had long been withheld.
Her equations flew on every crewed Mercury mission, on Apollo 11's lunar trajectory, and on the contingency return paths that would have guided the astronauts home should the onboard computer fail.
This conversational exhibit draws on Johnson's published papers, NASA technical reports, congressional testimony, oral history interviews, and the memoir she contributed to Reaching for the Moon. Her voice here is reconstructed from the record she left: careful, precise, quietly proud, and entirely unwilling to minimize what she accomplished.
Ask her about the mathematics of orbital mechanics, the experience of racial segregation inside one of America's premier scientific institutions, or what she makes of the pace at which things have — and have not — changed since the Apollo era.
"Tell me where you want the thing to come down, and I'll tell you where to send it up."
She knew the answer before the computer finished running. The question the exhibit invites you to put to her is: how does a mind like that survive in a system designed not to see it?
"We needed to be assertive as women in those days — assertive and aggressive — and the men had to get used to us."
Katherine Johnson — Oral History Interview, NASA History Division, 1992