“Some succeed because they are destined to. Others succeed because they are determined to.”                                                                           Henry Van Dyke

February 1962 – Cape Canaveral, Florida: Astronaut John Glenn was excited to be the first American to orbit the Earth, but the space orbit re-entry bothered him. He didn’t trust the new million-dollar IBM 7090 computer analytics. Three days before his Mercury mission launch, Glenn had one final request. As part of the pre-flight checklist, he asked the flight engineers, “Could you have that girl, Johnson, check the calculations one more time? If she says the numbers are good, then I am ready to go.”

That girl, 43-year-old Katherine Johnson, was at her desk at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, when the call came in from the Cape. It didn’t bother Katherine that Glenn didn’t know her name, or that he referred to her as ‘that girl.’ What mattered was that she was the right person for the job. The success or failure of one of the most historic missions in American history was her responsibility. She would run the calculations for the exact point of spacecraft re-entry for the umpteenth time.

Katherine hailed from the small town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Early on, her parents recognized her brilliance with numbers. Her father referred to her as the girl who loved numbers. Katherine counted everything from the number of steps up to the church to the dishes and silverware she washed.

Because her little community didn’t offer public school for African Americans past the 8th grade, Katherine’s father relocated the family to Institute, West Virginia, near the campus of West Virginia State College so she could finish high school. She did just that at age 14, then in 1937 at age 18, Katherine earned a bachelor’s degree in math from West Virginia State College.

She taught school for a dozen years before hearing that NASA offered good paying jobs to mathematicians at Langley in Hampton, Virginia. She joined NASA in 1953 when most of its employees were white men. Brilliant and ambitious, gentle but persistent, Katherine ignored the racial and sexist comments and worked her way up the ranks.

In 1959, she became the first Black woman to lead the computing group at Langley. Before computers, NASA mathematicians were referred to as ‘computers.’ According to Katherine, “We were computers when computers still wore dresses.”

Katherine was chosen to lead the research for Project Mercury, America’s first orbital space flight. “Tell me where you want the astronaut to land back on earth,” she told her boss, “And I’ll tell you where and when to send him up.” Her study, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position,” consisted of 34 pages of calculations, including 22 main equations, nine error equations, two launch case studies and an ample backup of charts and graphs.

After hundreds of simulations, she finished the project on the Friday after Thanksgiving 1959. The report received months of scrutiny and analysis by engineers before finally being approved and published in September 1960.

Katherine’s team did the trajectory calculations for astronaut Alan Shepard’s flight. In May 1961, Shepard became the first American to travel in space. The 300-mile mission consisted of a 15-minute suborbital flight. Next up for NASA was John Glenn’s Mercury flight.

On February 17, 1962, when Katherine received the call to run the numbers again for John Glenn, she didn’t mind. A single error could have dire consequences for the spacecraft and for Glenn. She worked through every minute of the mission and calculated the exact entry point for the space capsule. The numbers were precise.

On February 20, 1962 at 9:47 a.m. EST, John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral. He became the first American to orbit the Earth during a 4-hour 55-minute three-orbit mission aboard the spacecraft Friendship 7. His orbit was flawless from launch to splashdown.

Because of the success of John Glenn’s flight, President John Kennedy announced his dream of placing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It was that girl Johnson who calculated the precise trajectories that took Apollo 11 to the moon and safely back in July 1969.

During her 33 years at NASA, Katherine Johnson broke race and gender barriers, showing young people that anyone can excel in math and science and reach for the stars. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded 97-year-old Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.