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Dorothy Vaughan

In 1943, Dorothy Vaughan, a 32-year-old high school mathematics teacher, started a new job. She became a Grade P1 mathematician, helping with the wartime effort at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. As the prime aircraft test facility of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), Langley was racing to make combat planes fly further, faster, on less fuel. To process the deluge of data from wind tunnels and other experiments, Langley needed number crunchers. It found them in “human computers”. These mathematicians were all women and, thanks to a recent executive order banning racial discrimination in defence hiring, many – like Vaughan – were black.

In 1949, Vaughan was made head of West Computing. Though it was segregated, Vaughan was nevertheless the first black woman to hold the position and the first black supervisor at NACA. She remained in the role until 1958, when the unit was shut down and NACA became NASA. On one hand, it was a victory for integration: Vaughan took a position working side-by-side with men and women of all races, programming the new electronic computers. On the other hand, Vaughan would never regain the rank she had held at West Computing, though she stayed with NASA until 1971, distinguishing herself as an expert FORTRAN programmer.

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Mary Jackson

As a mathematician and, later, an engineer at Langley, Mary Jackson worked on experimental supersonic aircraft, analysing how air flowed over every tiny feature, right down to the rivets. She also spent time in Langley’s wind tunnels, making painstaking adjustments to whittle down drag forces.

Jackson was invited to work in the wind tunnel after two years in the computing pool. To earn the new position, she had to take graduate-level courses after work hours, with special permission to sit in on the all-white classes. In 1958, she became NASA’s first black female engineer.

She was never promoted, though, and after 30 years, she made a change. Jackson had always tried to support women at NASA who were keen to advance their careers, advising them on coursework or ways to get a promotion. She took a job in human resources, helping other women and minorities advance into roles she had never been able to attain herself.

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Miriam Mann��

Miriam Mann started work as a Langley computer in 1943, thinking she would stay only as long as the war effort required her. But the war came and went, and Mann stayed – unlike the sign in ��the cafeteria. It read “Colored Computers” and relegated the black women of West Computing to a lone rear table. For Mann, this was too much. She took the sign away. Although a replacement materialised before long, the little rebellion shook up the department.

She was still at Langley when the first electronic computers were installed, and when West Computing was disbanded, she partnered with an engineer working on the mechanics of space docking manoeuvres. She stayed until 1966, when her health failed her. And although by then the “Colored Computers” sign was long gone, Mann’s story was passed down through her family and through the other women of West Computing: a story to inspire and empower.

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Christine Darden

As a sonic boom researcher at Langley, Christine Darden spent 25 years learning how to keep things quiet – that is, how to minimise the ear-shattering shock waves from faster-than-sound planes and rockets. But Darden herself was never one to stay silent. She joined the Langley computing pool in 1967 and dutifully ran the numbers for eight years. But she started to wonder: why were men with the exact same credentials and experience landing the higher-level engineer positions? Her question earned her the transfer she wanted, to engineering, where she began the sonic boom research that would take her to the upper levels of NASA management.

By the time she retired, in 2007, she had authored more than 50 papers on supersonic boom and aircraft design, and reached the senior executive level at NASA – the first African American to do so.

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Annie Easley

Annie Easley started out as a computer at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Hired in 1955, she became a programmer when computers became machines, honing her skills in programming languages like FORTRAN and SOAP.

In the 1970s, as well as daring to wear trousers to work, she made another radical choice and went back to college. She had joined NACA with just two years of pharmacy coursework on her resume. She completed a mathematics degree in 1977 while working 40-hour weeks.

Over the years, Easley produced code that went on to be used in renewable energy research, including batteries for early hybrid vehicles, as well as for the high-thrust liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen Centaur rocket used to get space capsules into orbit.

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IT WAS February 1962, and John Glenn was about to go on the journey of a lifetime. Five years before, the Soviets had shot Sputnik into space and the US was lagging badly behind. American pride and pre-eminence were riding on Glenn. And Glenn was riding on an Atlas rocket – a bomb with a seat belt, its firecracker course plotted out in exquisitely precise calculations. To make it back alive, Glenn had to put his faith in the numbers.

But Glenn didn’t trust the numbers, he trusted the “girl” who devised them. He was talking about 43-year-old black woman Katherine Johnson. Almost all her colleagues were white and male. Racial segregation was widespread and no woman was considered responsible enough even to take out a loan on their own. So how did Johnson come to be as integral to US success in space as household names like Glenn and Neil Armstrong?

From an early age it was clear Johnson was clever. Born in 1918, she was in high school by age 10 and left college with degrees in French and mathematics at just 18. Even so, for many years teaching was the only work open to her. Then she heard there were jobs on offer at the Langley aeronautical lab near Newport News, Virginia, part of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). There, engineers were turning out huge amounts of data in nascent fields like jet engine and wing shape design, and faster-than-sound aircraft. “Human computers” – all women – did the mathematical hard labour. And since the second world war, jobs in the defence industry had been open to people of colour. Johnson was hired in 1953.

Virginia was a bastion of segregation. Black people attended separate schools, had to ride at the back of public buses and were banned from “whites only” restaurants; it was a crime to marry a person of a different race. Compared with the outside world, Langley was an oasis of inclusion. But the toilets, cafeteria and computing pool were still segregated.

Johnson, however, was not one to be cowed by racism. She refused to use the “colored” ladies’ room, and ate lunch at her desk as she filled with endless figures. And if she encountered racism, Johnson displayed a sort of wilful naiveté: “There was always a sense of, ‘I dare the racism to raise its head against me! I refuse, this is beneath me, and I simply refuse to participate in it,'” says Margot Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures (see “The women who figured a way to space“).

Johnson’s talent was obvious from the start, and within just two weeks she landed a plum stint in the Flight Research Division, working alongside the aeronautical engineers. Her personality – generous, funny, confident – helped to defuse whatever scepticism the engineers might have had about her abilities.

Then, on 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into orbit. Alarm spread across the US. As the idea of a Soviet-dominated “Red sky” gripped the nation, the government took action. NACA became NASA and suddenly Langley was recast: it became the hub for space research, a key player in the effort to reach the moon and win the space race.

The flight engineers began a crash course in the physics of orbital mechanics, rocket propulsion and spacecraft re-entry, each taking a subject, learning what they could then giving lectures to their colleagues in closed-door sessions. Outside, Johnson carried on with her work, devouring every bit of information and piecing together the action, yet relegated to the sidelines.

She longed to be included. So Johnson asked if she could join the meetings. There were no rules against allowing women, and in any case they were using her work in those sessions. To the engineers, though, women were calculators not thinkers. It just wasn’t done. But Johnson was made of strong stuff, and confident in her abilities. She kept asking them to let her in, day after day, and also raised questions about the research, proving she was no mere calculator. In the end, they ran out of excuses. Her persistence paid off and Johnson became part of the space programme. Meanwhile, the US’s first astronauts moved into the next-door office to begin their training.

The Soviets had sent a satellite into orbit; the challenge now was to get an astronaut into orbit. Johnson and the engineer she partnered with, Ted Skopinski, took on the key problem of spacecraft trajectory. Using dozens of equations, they showed how to calculate the location directly beneath a spacecraft at every moment of its voyage. It was no small feat. The pair had to take coordinates in the plane of the craft’s orbit – tilted relative to Earth – and translate them into familiar latitude and longitude on the spinning planet, accounting for the fact the planet bulges around its equator. It took nearly two years, yet when the paper came out in 1960, it was a major advance in mission planning, enabling astronauts to know exactly when to trigger the retrorockets to splash down on target.

But while Johnson’s calculations were being programmed into new IBM computers, the Soviets struck again. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space and the first to go into orbit. Still, the US pushed forward with its programme, and Johnson’s work paid off in several successful flight tests. The next big step came in 1961, when Alan Shepard rocketed into the atmosphere, becoming the first American in space. The 15-minute suborbital flight wasn’t nearly enough to catch up, but it signalled to the world that, finally, the Soviets had real competition.

Going into orbit was a much bigger undertaking and Glenn, like every astronaut, understood the risk. As the big day approached, he was worried. How could he be sure that the trajectory generated by the IBM machine would get him back home? To him, real computers were not machines, they were people – he’d seen them at Langley.

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” he reportedly said. Only then would he fly. So Johnson set to work, redoing the calculations by hand. After a day and a half meticulously working through huge piles of data, she and Glenn breathed a sigh of relief: the numbers checked out.

“She took on the key problem of calculating spacecraft trajectory”

Glenn blasted off on 20 February 1962. It was a nail-biting journey: a warning sensor meant Glenn had to skip jettisoning the rocket pack as planned. But the calculations held, and he splashed down safely in the Atlantic after his third orbit. The mission was a success. America was back in the game and Glenn became a national hero.

The celebrations were more modest for Johnson. As an unsung hero, she watched Glenn’s parade around Newport News, then went back to work.

She went on to achieve much more, though. It was she who calculated the timings for the first moon landing. In later years, she worked on the space shuttle programme. Now 98, she has outlived all of NASA’s first astronauts, including Glenn, who died last month. Yet only recently has her work been recognised outside of NASA. In 2015, after devoting her life to furthering our understanding of space, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. The movie Hidden Figures, about Johnson and the other NASA computers, is out in the UK on 17 February.

Johnson’s life has spanned a time of huge social and technological change. She was at the forefront of both.

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This article appeared in print under the headline “Get the girl to check the numbers”