katherine johnson nasa group achievement award

Tragically, Lawrence died in a training accident. He logged more than 2,000 hours flying jets, including the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and he studied a difficult steep-descent gliding technique called the flare maneuver-work that contributed significantly to the development of the Space Shuttle. In 1967, Robert Lawrence was the first African-American selected for a space program. With no opportunity for advancement at the Instrumentation Lab, Denniston left MIT in 1968 and enrolled in Radcliffe College. After graduating in 1973, she attended Boston University Law School, then went on to practice law in the private sector. 'Elaine Denniston: The woman who corrected Apollo's code,' Astronomy, 21 June 2019 I didn’t even take physics because was a girls’ school.”īut half a century later, her former boss would remember Denniston with the rest of the section’s Apollo team. “I was a fairly naive, immature 26- or 27-year old. “Apollo was in the background,” she recalls. In her mind, it was simply a job, and she was a young mother with children to feed. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.īorn and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, she was hired into MIT’s Instrumentation Lab (now called Draper) via a staffing agency on the basis of her experience keypunching cards for an insurance company. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan.Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953.She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight test, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. Katherine left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president Dr. Katherine graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.

Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in Mathematics. At eighteen, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. By thirteen, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. MIT-educated engineers and scientists played a vital role within NASA and its contractors to execute a wide variety of tasks necessary to achieve the national goal of landing on the moon.īorn in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918, Katherine Johnson’s intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. As a result, NASA's relationship with the Institute deepened during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Known as the Cold War, this period also saw the increasing momentum of the “space race” between the two countries. and the Soviet Union were engaged in a contest over the ideologies and allegiances. NASA's mission was directly related to the pressures of national defense after World War II when the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 'to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes'. Killian, Jr., then a special assistant for science and technology to U.S.

In 1958, NACA became NASA on the recommendation of MIT president James R.

Katherine johnson nasa group achievement award