Who would you want to check the work if you were the one who had to climb into the capsule?
In 1962, John Glenn was preparing to orbit Earth. Computers on the ground could calculate the path his spacecraft would take. NASA had people to build those machines, people to program them and people to read their output. Glenn still had a request. He wanted Katherine Johnson to check the numbers.
For most of us, trust is an easy word to use while somebody else is taking the risk. Glenn was going to strap himself into the answer.
What the job title left out
When Johnson arrived at Langley in 1953, a computer could be a person. She worked in West Area Computing, the segregated unit where Black women mathematicians performed calculations for research teams. Think for a moment about what that job title tells you. You can picture the work arriving on a desk. You can picture a result being sent back. It tells you almost nothing about the person deciding whether the result makes sense.
A temporary assignment took Johnson into flight research. She stayed. She analyzed flight data. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski put their names to a report on how to get a spacecraft into orbit over a chosen spot on Earth. NASA identifies her as the first woman in that division credited as an author of a research report.
Her name is there on the document. It seems a small thing until you consider what a name allows the next person to do. If they have a question about the reasoning, they know whom to ask. If another mission faces a similar problem, they can find the person who has already thought it through. A name lets the judgment travel with the work.
The person he asked for
By the time Glenn was getting ready to fly, Johnson had also worked on the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s flight. Electronic computers could run the equations for Glenn’s orbital mission, but the astronauts knew the equipment could falter. Johnson recalled Glenn asking the engineers to have her run the same calculations on her desktop calculating machine.
In her recollection, Glenn called her “the girl.” He also made his readiness to fly depend on her judgment. Both details belong in the story. There is something uncomfortable about how little of a woman can fit into the language used to describe her, even when the person speaking knows exactly how much he needs her.
And there is something deeply personal in being asked for by name, or so specifically that everyone knows whose desk to go to. Glenn could have asked for another set of calculations. His request included a person.
Think of the last time someone asked for you that way. Perhaps it was a colleague who wanted you beside them for a difficult conversation. Perhaps it was a sister who called from a hospital corridor because you listen carefully when she is scared. If someone asked them why it had to be you, could they put it into words? Could you?
What she would have told you
There is a temptation to leave Johnson beside that calculating machine, her place in history secure because an astronaut trusted her. But ask a different person what mattered most and you get a different story.
According to NASA, when Johnson was asked about her greatest contribution, she spoke about Apollo. She had worked on the calculations that helped the lunar module and the command module meet again in orbit around the Moon.
Imagine those two crews for a moment. One had gone down to the surface. The other had stayed in orbit. Going home together meant finding one another again. That was the work Johnson chose to talk about when the question was hers to answer.
It changes how you read the Glenn story. You can be grateful that one person recognized what you could do and still have a much larger answer to the question of who you are. Sometimes even our most admiring account of somebody leaves out the thing they are proudest of.
There may be someone whose work you trust enough to put your name behind it. Perhaps you already thank them. Next time, tell them what you trusted them to see. Then ask which piece of their work they wish more people understood.
Give them time to answer. You might know their John Glenn story by heart and still have never heard about the Moon.
Reporting and archival photograph: NASA’s biography of Katherine Johnson and account of her work on Mercury and Apollo.
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