![]() ![]() Why does Charles Murray not mention her in his seminal book on the Apollo program (co-authored with Katherine Murray), Apollo: Race to the Moon?.Why isn’t Johnson mentioned in John Glenn’s John Glenn: A Memoir or Alan Shepard’s Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon?.Henson and Octavia Spencer recently were cast).īut the recent canonization of Katherine Johnson and her “untold” contributions to NASA’s incredible achievements (think about it: the Wright brothers were the first humans to fly in 1903, NASA landed men on the moon only 66 years later) stretches credulity. Kennedy’s promise of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s:Īnd Fox 2000 and Chernin are developing Hidden Figures, a movie about the African-American women who helped NASA launch its first space missions (Taraji P. This helped spawned a bidding war over the “true” story of how a lone black female helped fulfill John F. The primarily white Main Stream Media began frenetic virtue-signaling with the #OscarsSoWhite movement. NASA, along with the companies that performed contract work during Apollo, was a reflection of society’s workforce in the late 1960s - mostly white, mostly male.īut NASA’s website now reports that Katherine Johnson, a blue-eyed, light-skinned black female,Ĭalculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space…even after NASA began using electronic computers, John Glenn requested that she personally recheck the calculations made by the new electronic computers before his flight aboard Friendship 7 - the mission on which he became the first American to orbit the Earth.” Historians of the space program recognize the awful truth: But it is part of an insistent revisionist history of NASA, which was in fact almost entirely staffed by whites until the Apollo program was shuttered in the early 1970s. With Glenn’s death, we will never know if this conversation ever took place. Glenn was supposedly asking for one more check before his flight into space - a review of the orbital trajectory generated by the IBM 7090 computer. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I’m ready to go.” “Get the girl to check the numbers,” said the astronaut. In the book on which the movie is based, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly, Glenn is quoted as having said this of Katherine Johnson, the black female brain allegedly behind NASA’s greatest glories. And with Glenn’s death goes the possibility of refuting one of the stranger tales born in the Current Year and poised to become the definitive story of the Mercury and Apollo missions: the Christmas Day-scheduled movie Hidden Figures’ “untold true story” that black women were the real force behind America’s space exploration. Glenn, a Marine fighter pilot in WWII and Korea, was the first man to orbit the earth in 1962. ![]() Johnson died on Februat her home in Newport News, Virginia at the age of 101.John Glenn’s passing at the age of 95 is just another reminder that the era of infinite possibility is sadly passing away. She was included in the BBC series 100 Women the next year. In 2015, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was the first women to attend an editorial meeting at NASA. Katherine Goble Johnson wrote 26 research reports. Johnson also did calculations for plans for a mission to Mars. Her calculations were critical to the success of these missions. She made it possible for many space flights such as Project Mercury, including the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through the Space Shuttle program to happen. She was also known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation. She was known for her work on the United States' aeronautics and space programs where she worked with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Katherine Johnson was 1 of the first 3 black people allowed to study at West Virginia University, which before that was officially racist and did not let black people be students. She finished schooling at a very early age. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (Aug– February 24, 2020) was an African American physicist and mathematician. Calculating the trajectories for many NASA missions
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |