The story resonates decades later amid continued struggles to break down the remaining barriers for underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and math. But her efforts to break down that institutional barrier received support from a colleague, Skopinski, who held a position of relative power and privilege. This mission was one of many in her long career working for NASA in moving space exploration forward, which included working on the space shuttle and Apollo. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Johnson began her career in 1953 at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that preceded NASA, one of a number of African-American women hired to work as 'computers' in what was then their Guidance and Navigation Department. #KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA WORKS MANUAL#First, Johnson was excellent at her job, had done the work, and quietly insisted on her due, just as she had insisted on a place in engineering briefings before that. Katherine Johnson was a NASA mathematician who played a key role in numerous NASA missions during the Space Race, perhaps most notably calculating the trajectory needed to get the Apollo 11 mission. Name:Date:1.41.4 Katherine JohnsonKatherine Johnson is an outstanding mathematician who worked for NASA on projects ranging fromthe birth of the space. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers. Her brilliance with numbers shone early on and vaulted her ahead several grades in. The teacher who sees potential in Katherine, however, wants to make sure that she has a chance to go as far as possible. The state of the United States means that a young person of color would have a hard path to an education. In September 1960, Pearson was pushing Johnson's coauthor, Skopinski, to finish the report and put his name on it before leaving for a planned trip to Houston.Īs Johnson later recalled, "Finally, Ted told him, 'Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway.' So Ted left Pearson with no choice I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something." But it wasn't the last Johnson would go on to put her name in its rightful place on another 25 reports and papers before she retired, and she had opened a door for her female colleagues in the process. Before Katherine works as a computer at NASA, she's a little girl with a head for numbers. And it was a significant thing to claim credit for, especially for a woman of color in 1960 whose employer had nominally desegregated its workforce in 1958 but whose supervisor, Henry Pearson, was "no fan of women," as Johnson put it.
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