Willingboro Township Public Schools

Katherine Johnson was born in 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She started high school when she was just 10 years old and college when she was 15. After she graduated with honors at 18, she taught Black students math. She and the other women worked as “human computers,” at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), figuring out the difficult calculations needed for spaceflight. During her time there, she broke racial barriers, like using the bathroom that was supposed to be for white women only. One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the path, of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., had a safe trip. She also helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet and in 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11. Katherine Johnson received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2015).