Character Catalog

Katherine Johnson manually calculated the ballistic trajectory for the first crewed American spaceflight. This calculation, completed in a matter of hours, allowed Alan Shepard to become the first American in space.

John Glenn refused to launch for his orbital flight until Katherine had personally verified the IBM computer's calculations. Her manual verification confirmed the data, and Glenn completed three orbits around the Earth.

The first official research report co-signed by Katherine Johnson at NASA, covering the equations for placing a satellite into orbit. It marked a first for a woman in the agency's flight research division.

Katherine Johnson contributed to the equations enabling Apollo 11's lunar landing and the safe return of the astronauts to Earth, representing the pinnacle of a career dedicated to space exploration.

During her final years at NASA, Katherine worked on trajectory calculations for the Space Shuttle program, contributing to the new generation of reusable space vehicles.

This report presents equations and procedures for determining the azimuth angle at burnout required to place a satellite over a selected earth position at a specified time.

Katherine Johnson's mathematical genius helped ensure that the United States won the Space Race. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and was asked personally by John Glenn to run the numbers for his own historic Earth orbit.

We needed to be assertive as women in those days — assertive and aggressive — and the degree to which I was able to be, I'm happy to say, was rewarded.

Johnson contributed to the calculations for the trajectory analysis used for the first American crewed spaceflights, including Freedom 7 and Friendship 7, and later for the Apollo lunar missions.

Katherine Johnson's hometown, in a state where access to secondary and higher education was extremely limited for Black children. Her father drove 200 km every year to allow her to continue her studies.

Katherine earned her bachelor's degree here at age 18, then became one of the first three Black students to join the graduate programs during desegregation in 1939.

The site of Katherine Johnson's entire career at NASA (1953–1986). It is here that she calculated the trajectories for America's first space missions, in buildings still marked by racial segregation.

Launch site for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions whose trajectories Katherine Johnson had calculated. Each liftoff represented the realization of her mathematical equations.

In 2017, NASA renamed the Langley computing building in her honor, officially recognizing the contribution of African-American women to the conquest of space.

Before electronic computers, Katherine used analog slide rules and logarithmic tables to perform complex trajectory calculations. These instruments were the everyday tools of NASA's human 'computers'.

The computing rooms at NACA and later NASA were equipped with large blackboards on which mathematicians worked out their differential equations and orbital systems. Katherine would spend hours solving celestial mechanics problems on them.

Introduced in the early 1960s, this massive computer performed calculations that women had previously done by hand. Katherine was trained to verify its results and program it, becoming a bridge between human computation and the machine.

In 1960, Katherine was one of the first women to officially sign a NASA research report. This document represented an institutional breakthrough in a field that was heavily male-dominated and racially segregated.

The access badge for Langley's research areas, obtained despite racial barriers, symbolized for Katherine and her colleagues their full and complete membership in the scientific team, in spite of the pervasive segregation.

These large graph sheets depicting Earth-Moon orbital transfer curves were the result of hundreds of hours of calculation. Katherine helped establish the mathematical parameters guaranteeing the safe return of the Apollo astronauts.