Her work helped map the moon’s surface ahead of the 1969 landing and played a role in the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts. Johnson Computational Research Facility is the third building in NASA Langleys 20-year revitalization plan. She worked on trajectories for Shepard’s Mercury flight, America’s first manned spaceflight, and earned a measure of fame as “the girl” - as female mathematicians were called - who double-checked the output for Glenn’s spaceflight. She pushed her way into briefings traditionally attended only by men and secured a place in the inner circle of the American Space Program. She worked there for years until the Soviet satellite Sputnik kicked off the space race between the US and the USSR, spurring the transformation of NACA into America’s space agency, NASA. After just two weeks, she transferred to the facility’s Flight Research Division. She started in in the segregated West Area Computing Group in 1953 under Dorothy Vaughan. The 23 million building will house four of the. When she learned of a job opening at Langley for black women with math degrees she and her husband moved their three daughters to Newport News, Virginia. NASA has dedicated its newest, state-of-the-art research facility in Hampton, Virginia to Katherine Johnson.

space program, died on February 24 at age 101. Lauded NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose data skills as a human computer for the U.S. Like many women of her time she became a teacher - but her sights were set on becoming a research mathematician. Photo: NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images. It paid off and she graduated from high school at 14 and graduated from West Virginia State in 1937 at 18. Recognizing their youngest daughter’s talent for math, her parents sent her to high school on the campus of West Virginia State Institute, a black college 100 miles away. Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where education for black people ended in eighth grade. President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician and physicist Katherine Johnson at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 24, 2015.

Katherine johnson nasa building