RIP Katherine Johnson

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "American Hero.
Thank you, Katherine Johnson. https://t.co/TzbEP8HUuY" / Twitter
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NASA on Twitter: "We're saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers: [url]https://t.co/Tl3tsHAfYB https://t.co/dGiGmEVvAW" / Twitter[/url]
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Katherine Johnson | NASA
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Katherine Johnson Biography | NASA
She had a remarkable life.

She was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918.

In school, her great skill with mathematics advanced her in grades, and she graduated from college with highest honors in 1937 and became a schoolteacher. She started work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics's Langley laboratory; NACA was a predecessor of NASA, and she worked on analyzing data from flight tests.

After the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, she got into spaceflight math, and in 1962, she checked some trajectory calculations done on early computers by doing them by hand with a desktop calculator. She continued to do spaceflight calculations, doing them for the Apollo spacecraft, the Space Shuttle, and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS, later Landsat). She authored or coauthored 26 research reports.

She retired in 1986, after 33 years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she said about her experience. In 2015, at age 97, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US's highest civilian honor.

(From the page) She died on Feb. 24, 2020. NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said, "Our NASA family is sad to learn the news that Katherine Johnson passed away this morning at 101 years old. She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten."

Her NASA career was dramatized in Hidden Figures (2016) - IMDb

 

[lpetrich]

Women@NASA on Twitter: "Mathematician. Leader. Heroine.
Katherine Johnson not only helped calculate the trajectories that took our Apollo astronauts to the Moon — she was champion for women and minorities in the space program and the world as a whole. We honor her memory today. [url]https://t.co/kH9qEEvdMY https://t.co/A341ukDFTl" / Twitter[/url]

Julius Montgomery, Who Broke a Space-Age Race Barrier, Dies at 90 - The New York Times - "In the Jim Crow South, he was the first black professional to be hired at Cape Canaveral, then made a sacrifice so that a technology school might open."

n 1956, he had become the first African-American who was not a janitor to be hired to work at the Cape Canaveral space facility in Florida. He was part of a team of technical professionals, known as “range rats,” who repaired the electronics in malfunctioning ballistic missiles and satellite equipment.

Two years later, his team wanted to start a school to keep the space workers up-to-date. Brevard Engineering College, as it was to be called (Cape Canaveral is in Brevard County), planned to lease classrooms at a public junior high school near the space center.

But public officials in Florida — a state still in the grip of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan — had control over who walked into their classrooms. And they didn’t want black people.

They threatened to shut down this college before it opened, so JM withdrew his application to allow it to open. Three years later, it admitted him. It is now known as the Florida Institute of Technology.