She best explained her job in her own words: “Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start,” Johnson said in a 2008 NASA interview. Johnson’s math enabled that choreography. The missions to send humans to space and back had to be precise and choreographed. This means that Johnson needed to calculate the entire trajectory of the flight - where it started, how fast it went, and where it would land. Were an astronaut to touch down in a desolate corner of the ocean, without any land in sight, it could presumably take days to be rescued (if rescued at all). One of the trickiest bits: the spacecraft couldn’t just land anywhere. But equally hard was getting that human to land safely back on Earth. In the 1960s, NASA had figured out how to launch a human being aboard a rocket into space. She figured out how to get spacecraft there. Here’s what she did, and why she’ll be remembered for a long time. As Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian, told the Washington Post in an obituary: “If we go back to the moon, or to Mars, we’ll be using her math.” She was also a pioneer in that her work helped put humans in space, and returned them safely home to Earth.īefore rising to pop-culture fame with the book and movie Hidden Figures, before being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Johnson created and calculated some extremely important equations to make America’s adventures in spaceflight successful. Her intellect and sassiness sustained her every time she faced adversity.Katherine Johnson, who died Monday at age 101, was a pioneer in many ways: She was an early employee of NASA (and even worked at the agency that predated it), and an African American woman working in a field hugely dominated by white men. The spunk with which Janelle Monáe portrays Jackson shows that this extraordinary woman enjoyed life to the fullest. Zielinski encourages Jackson to take graduate physics courses, and she eventually becomes an aeronautical engineer for NASA. Jackson is fortunate that the NASA mission specialist she works with, Polish engineer Karl Zielinski (Olek Krupa), is more progressive in his thinking. It is Michael, however, who has to later humble herself to Vaughan’s supervision once Vaughan masters the IBM, the massive computer that could potentially result in their unemployment. Vaughan has to endure patronizing disrespect on a daily basis from her boss Vivian Michael (Kirsten Dunst), a white woman satisfied with the sexist status quo as long as her black female counterparts don’t advance. Octavia Spencer portrays Vaughan with a no-nonsense demeanor, an intelligent black woman who knows how to shrewdly navigate the racial confines within her division. Vaughan oversees the colored computers, except she does not hold the deserved title of supervisor. We come to see that if it had not been for Johnson calculating the trajectories for the Friendship 7 mission, America would have been wishing Glenn “Godspeed” for a somber occasion. When Johnson pushes for inclusion in Pentagon briefings, she gains further respect from her boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), and makes an enduring impression on John Glenn (Glen Powell). Stafford is appalled that a black woman has been assigned to double-check his math for launch and landing calculations, but his deliberate efforts to undermine Johnson end up showcasing her genius. Henson, encounters the arrogance and contempt of a white engineer named Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons). Johnson, played with an affectionate nerdy and conservative charm by Taraji P. Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson are in the midst of their own civil rights battles at work, confronting sexist and racist dynamics, and each of them is uniquely equipped with the stamina and temperament to deal with their challenges. We are then fast-forwarded to 1961, the second year in a decade bursting with the exuberance of the Kennedys in the White House and the year that courageous college students formed groups of “Freedom Riders” to challenge segregation in interstate travel down South.
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