In 1961, she analyzed the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission, the first human spaceflight completed by the United States. This assignment led to some of the achievements for which Johnson is best known. She was quickly reassigned to the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division. For her first two weeks, Johnson worked in the all-African American West Area Computing section. When Katherine Johnson began her 33-year career in 1953, Langley Research Center was racially segregated.
NASA Langley Research Center Historic District (Katherine Johnson) Katherine Johnson working as a "computer" at NASA in 1966. This article features properties in the National Register of Historic Places that are related to their stories. Nevertheless, African American women played a critical role in the Space Race and rose to new heights as mathematicians, computer programmers, team project leads, and engineers at NASA. African American women faced additional barriers because of racial discrimination. At the time, opportunities for women to advance in their careers were limited. The agency did not open these positions to African American women until 1943 to address labor shortages during World War II. NACA began hiring white women as computers in 1935. Many of these women got their start as “human computers,” performing complicated calculations that supported the work of male engineers. During the 1950s and 1960s, they joined dozens of other African American women who crunched numbers and processed data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
In 2016, the film Hidden Figures skyrocketed Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan to household names. The content for this article was researched and written by Jade Ryerson, an intern with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education.
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