Some of Johnson’s most notable work was doing trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and fellow colleague, engineer Ted Skopinski, co-authored “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position,” a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.
Life Magazine signed exclusive contracts with the Project Mercury astronauts. Life wanted to bring their personal stories to the public, showcasing how important the American Space Program was to popular culture. Photo from the New-York Historical Society's Time, Inc. Archive.
In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers that had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission in Washington D.C., Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the hands of these machines, which often did not work.
Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures details, “As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to ‘get the girl’—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. ‘If she says they’re good,’ Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, ‘then I’m ready to go.’” The flight of Friendship 7 was a success, and marked a turning point not only in the Space Race but also popular culture.
Following Project Mercury, she joined the Space Mechanics Division, and calculated the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, and computed backup navigational charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures.
Life released a special edition issue dedicated to the Apollo 11 mission, one that Katherine Johnson worked on. Photo from the New-York Historical Society's Time, Inc. Archive.
In 1970, Apollo 13’s aborted mission to the Moon made use of her earlier research on backup parameters and charts, enabling the crew to safely return to Earth four days later. Later in her career, as a member of the Flight Dynamics and Control Division, she worked on the Space Shuttle program, the Earth Resources Satellite, and plans for a mission to Mars. Her final projects before retirement included analysis of guidance and control of large flexible structures.