The Her Edit

Black History Month · Then & Now

She checked the numbers that sent astronauts into orbit, and for decades, almost no one knew her name. A reflection on quiet brilliance and being counted.

Some of the most important work in history has been done by women whose names were left off the page.

Katherine Johnson was one of them. For years, she worked in rooms where she was expected to be invisible. And yet, when a man was about to be launched into orbit around the Earth, it was her he asked for.

A curious girl

Katherine was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She loved numbers from the very beginning — counting steps, counting dishes, counting stars. She was so far ahead that she started high school at ten, and she graduated from college at eighteen with degrees in mathematics and French.

In a segregated America, there were few doors open to a brilliant Black woman. So she taught. She married. She raised three daughters. And she kept her curiosity alive, even when there was nowhere obvious for it to go.

The room of “computers”

In 1953, Katherine joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — the organisation that would later become NASA. She worked in the West Area Computing unit: a group of Black women mathematicians, known as “computers,” who did calculations by hand. They worked in segregated offices and ate in segregated spaces.

Katherine didn’t wait to be invited into the rooms where decisions were made. She asked questions. She asked to attend briefings that women didn’t usually attend. Eventually, she simply went.

Her work became essential. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s 1961 flight, the first American in space.

“Get the girl to check the numbers”

In 1962, John Glenn was preparing to become the first American to orbit the Earth. NASA had begun using electronic computers for the calculations, but they were new, and many didn’t yet trust them.

Before he flew, Glenn reportedly asked for one thing: for Katherine to check the computer’s numbers by hand. If she said they were good, he was ready to go.

She did. They were. He went.

“Like what you do, and then you will do your best.”

— Katherine Johnson

Katherine went on to work on calculations for the Apollo 11 mission that landed people on the Moon, and on the Space Shuttle programme. She co-authored more than twenty-five scientific reports — at a time when women rarely had their names on any of them.

Recognised, finally

For much of her life, Katherine’s contribution was known mainly by those who worked beside her. That changed in her later years. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, the book and film Hidden Figures brought her story, and those of her colleagues, to millions of people.

She died in 2020, at 101 years old — long enough to see the world finally say her name.

What she leaves with me

I’ve come to think of Katherine as a lesson in quiet brilliance. She wasn’t loud. She didn’t demand attention. But she knew her worth, and she asked the questions that got her into the room.

There’s a gentle permission in that for those of us who don’t consider ourselves “loud.” You don’t have to perform confidence to be exceptional. You can be precise, careful and calm — and still change the course of history.

There is something tender, too, in how long it took for her to be seen. It makes me wonder about the women around us now — in offices, in labs, in kitchens and classrooms — whose work is holding things up in ways no one is noticing. Perhaps part of honouring Katherine is learning to notice them.

Softly, Fiona x.