← Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood
Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood
181. Katherine Johnson - NASA's Human Computer
01:03:45
Mathematician & American Hero
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Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt)
We're proud boricuas. And what does that mean? And we are still in a fight.
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We're telling stories about champions from a place worth fighting for. Stories that will inspire you no matter where you're from.
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Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt)
Wow.
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Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt)
Hello delicious friends, and welcome to who did what Now. The history podcast. That is not your history class. With me, your host, Katie Charlwood, History Harlowt and reader of book books. So here's the thing. Complaints on my videos aren't new. Like, they happen all the time, Whether you've got 10 followers or 100,000 followers or whatever, right? And I, I get complaints and people have issues all the time. And some of them fair enough, others a bit weird, right? And I've noticed the same issue crop up a couple times, like over the last month specifically, which is weird. I don't know why so many people would have an issue regarding Black history during Black History Month. Now, apart from the fact that some people can't grasp that specific concept, which I feel like out of everything is the easiest part out of this. Now what the issue seems to be quite a lot recently. The the complaint that people are making is that in my videos, I'm talking about the Past events and people that have happened many years away from now. Like back the way right now. I don't like to call people stupid, you know, because I think it's a wee bit redundant. However, I do wonder, like, how smooth does your brain have to be for you to be upset that a historian is talking about the past? Like, what part of a historian discussing history like, doesn't make sense to you? Like, where. Where does that compute? Like, I don't. I don't get it. Anyway, anyway, I thought I'd share that with you. But anyway, that's not the point. Let's talk about someone amazing today. Listen, did you really think I was gonna go through Black History Month without talking about amazing women? As if. Okay. And of course I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Katie, quit your jibble jab of in fact me. Infact you I will. But first, next we've got to get our source on. Our sources are Black Women Scientists in the United States by Winnie Warren. Human Computers the Women in Aeronautical Research by Beverly Gilemba. Katherine Johnson by Shirley Malcolm. Katherine Johnson. The Girl who Loved to Count by Yvette Smith. The woman the Mercury astronauts couldn't do without by Margot Lee Shetterly. And of course, of course, Hidden the American Dream and the Untold Story of the black Women Mathematicians who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly. My Remarkable Journey by Katherine Johnson. And of course we have our old favourites, smithsonian.com and history.com are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then let's begin. Some of you may have seen the Inspired by a True Story 2016 movie. Hidden Figures like this is what Cold War era, specifically the space race where the USA and the USSR were competing to be the first to get a man well into space onto the moon. So on and so forth. Hidden figures focused primarily on three black women from the NASA program that successfully launched John Glenn into orbit and brought him back home again. Now it is a wee bit white savory, but other than that the performances are stellar. Like it's a good movie. I mean, from my very white perspective. So these three amazing women are Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and of course Katherine Johnson. And I'm going to focus on Katherine Johnson today. Now I am going to go back and talk about the other two at some point. But today we are going to celebrate Katherine Johnson. Criola Kathryn Coleman was born on 26 August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, USA. She was the youngest of four children to Joylette Roberta Lowe, who was a teacher and Joshua McKinley Coleman a handyman, a farmer, a lumberjack, and later he would work at the Greenbrier Hotel. According to the 1910 census, Joshua owned the farm he worked on as opposed to being like a sharecropper, which effectively is tenant farming and is. So, yeah, sharecropping is basically being a tenant farmer where you would grow a certain amount of crops, you would give a lot of these crops to the landowner and you would make like a teeny weeny bit of money off it and you couldn't save any of the seeds, you couldn't do anything like that. And it was basically a way to kind of keep you sort of indentured, you know, I mean, anyway, he was not a sharecropper according to the census. So Catherine had three older siblings, Horace, Margaret and Charles. Please can we bring back the name Horace? It's just old names are fun. Let's bring them back. Horace. Cheltenham Primrose. These are all good. They're good names. I don't give a fuck. They're good names. Now it can be easy to dismiss someone with a sort of blue collar job, you know, a farmer, a plumber or whatever, and assume that because their jobs are physical, because it's manual labor, that they lack mental acuity. However, Catherine's father, Joshua had a mind for mathematics, something that Catherine seemed to have an inherent talent for. Sidebar. Yes, we're already on a sidebar. So my papa, so my maternal grandfather, he left at 14. He left the country, he went and started working like he worked in coal mines, he worked in irrigation. So like he literally was the person who laid pipe. And so at one point he was working for like gas lines for gas piping and he had made his way up like the council, like he'd made his way up, you know, he worked his way up effectively and he always did physically demanding jobs his entire life. But that man's mental arithmetic. I have never met anybody before or since who was that quick and like, not only that, he wasn't just like quick with maths, he was quick witted and clever and witty and dear God, what I would give to be that sort of quick and intelligent and funny. Like, it's just. Anyway, he was amazing and one of the most compassionate men like ever. And that's why I have fucking standards, yo. That's what I was raised with. And he was the only person who never made fun of me for struggling to eat certain foods. So yep, also we can all blame him for the reason that I love potatoes, because he used to just give me a big bowl of mash with ridiculous amounts of butter in it. So we can blame him for that. So back to Catherine. As a toddler, she took to numbers, counting everything she came across, right? Plates, cups, stars in the sky, everything. And like with three older siblings, you know, they're practicing their mathematics homework and things like that. So it's not surprising that as a child, like, she would practice with them, like, she would pay attention, she would take it on board. So she already had a better baseline for going in to apply this sort of natural talent to. And being the era that it was, the education system, well, it was segregated like everything else. And Greenbrier county, it did not have public schooling for African American students beyond eighth grade. So that's like 13, 14, isn't it? It is, it is. So Catherine, she excelled in school. Like, she was tip top in all of our subjects, but she really, really excelled in maths, in mathematics. So the Colemans, they had arranged for their children to attend. Like the Coleman children, they were attending a school on the campus at the West Virginia State Institute, which is like just outside Charleston. So the West Virginia State Institute was an all black college of which there were very few in the region, especially on the east coast. So, yeah, there is a school on the campus of the wvsc and the children were at the institute, like during the school year, and then they went back to White Sulphur Springs during the summer. So Catherine, she goes through all this and she graduates high school at 14. Then she attends the WSVC where she takes every single maths course that is available. Like, they actually added courses just for her, including analytic geometry in space. Yeah, so she's got like calculus, geometry, the other ones, the geometry in space, long division algebra. I don't. I'm not a mathematician. I would never claim to be. Maths is not my strong suit under any circumstances. I'm really good at counting money, though. For some reason, you put coins in front of me and I'm like. I'm like one of those coin counting machines. I'm like, good. That can't do anything else. Sorry about the sidebar, but if there's a practical application, I might be fine otherwise. No, so. So she's doing this, right? And she is excelling, unsurprisingly, like passing every single one of these courses with bells on. So she actually joins like a sorority when she's going through college as well. And so she just has, like a really good educational experience. And she graduated summer cum laude in 1937, at the age of 18, with degrees in mathematics and French. And so she was ready to make her way in the world. Everybody encouraged her to pursue a career in teaching, even though she was a black woman in the South. Wait, it is the South? Let me check. Yes, the Southern United States. Virginia and West Virginia are both in that. So okay, geography is also not my strong suit. You're thinking, Katie, how did you pass school? I was like, with great determination. So she is facing discrimination, right? Very open discrimination from supervisors and principals. Because not only is she in the south, but you're still, you know, in the midst. Like you're coming near the end of it, but you're still in the Great Depression. You know, it's not easy for anybody, let alone a black woman in the South. So she goes to the Marion Weth county in Virginia, where she got a job at Carnegie High School teaching maths and French. Oui, oui. While in Marion, Catherine met James Francis Goble and they fell in love and secretly got married. Now this may shock you, but the law wasn't just racist, it was sexist as well. Racism and misogyny. Best friends who knew see Virginia law and U.S. law prohibited married women from having teaching careers. Because of course you can have many flavors of discrimination. Granted, this law would be overturned in 1964, which is well over 25 years later, but it does get overturned. So Catherine ends up leaving teaching anyway to go to graduate school. Catherine was the first African American woman to attend graduate school at the previously all white West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Basically, there was a Supreme court ruling in 1938, Missouri X Rail Gaines v. Canada, that required states to provide higher education to black students if it was already providing it to white students. This meant that universities would either have to integrate or the states would have to establish black colleges or universities. So they had two choices. They either integrate or they build more like spirit, specifically for black people. But unfortunately when more are built, they just put less funding into it. You know, they deliberately try prevent them from succeeding. Catherine was one of only three African American students to attend the university. And she was also the only black woman to attend. Now she only stays there a year. Now in her defence, she discovers that she's pregnant and so she leaves at the end of the summer session and for a while was a full time wife and mother. She and James go on to have three children together. Joylette is born in 1940, Constance in 1943, then Catherine in 1944. So this was a household. Like James, he was also like a science student. That's how they met. So they're both educated, they both love the sciences, they both love maths, and Catherine loves maths more than he does. But that's neither here nor there. But they are, they're happy together. But the house isn't like strictly an academic house. Like they, they love music. It's a very musical household. Like they play instruments. You've got like the violin, the cello, the piano and the organ. Like it's, you know, there's music, there's joy and you know, for the time that's in it, it's, you know, quite a happy household. Now for those of you who are good with dates, you may have clocked that this period of time is during World War II. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, setting off a chain reaction of alliances and attacks, right? So you've got the Axis powers versus the Allies. So you've got Germany, Italy, other ones. And then you've got the Allies, which is us, uk, France and Russia eventually. Cuz like Russia takes a wee while to actually like join the fight, but that's neither here nor there. Another group involved in this are Japan. So Japan, historically a country known to strike fast and strike harshly, had attacked Pearl harbor in 1941. And so that was really when the US like pumped up the gills and really jumped into the war. So large scale events like wars, although absolutely horrible and, you know, devastating, they breed necessity, right? So, so the First World War had led to a great leap forward in women's suffrage. So for some women, not all women, let's just make that clear, but it was still like a big step in the right direction. The Second World War was seen as an opportunity to make life better for black citizens in the usa, right? So you've got these leaps, like if everyone's involved, you're showing your patriotism, you're helping your country succeed, then you should be rewarded for that. So this would all in all make an opportunity for Catherine an opportunity for her to have a career as a professional mathematician. So Catherine had returned to teaching in 1944, teaching mathematics at a black school in Morgantown, West Virginia. So she had been teaching there for about eight years when her husband James's brother in law, so her sister in law's husband, he approaches her at a wedding to inform her that the government was hiring black women to work as mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. So the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, naca, the precursor to NASA, were hiring both black and white mathematicians for Their guidance and navigational department, like that's what they were hiring for. And so this man in law, he knew that Catherine had studied and was teaching maths. And he also knew Dorothy Vaughan. So Dorothy, she had a good few women working for her at the West Area Computing Section at naca. She and her family lived in Newcombe park and this dude was the director of the Newcombe Park Community Centre. Now, this work opportunity, it was a no brainer, right? So for Catherine, she loved teaching, but this may shock you, but an African American teacher salary in the 1950s wasn't exactly breaking the bank. Catherine and James, they were struggling to stay afloat with both of their paychecks. And so they take this opportunity, they move to Newport News and joined the community in Newcombe park. And Catherine applies for the job at naca.
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Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt)
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- [24:16]
Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt)
Now seems like a good time to slip into some context. Naca, the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, was a federal agency launched in 1917 in response to the US's lack of warplanes to support the Allied forces, and then later on, the American Expeditionary Force. The AEF Initially, it's a small division sharing a campus with the U.S. army Air Corps in Hampton, Virginia. The purpose of NACA was to study the science of flying and help develop the most powerful and efficient planes in the nation. Now, remember this point, planes actually haven't been around this long, like the Wright brothers. First, like, proper flight was 1903, right? You're talking, what, 50 years, which isn't huge, right? I mean, this. This is established, what, in 1917. The Wright brothers are 1903. So you're talking 14 years. And they're like, we need to learn about planes. And it's like, yeah, bitch, you do. So before military planes were commissioned, federal designs and companies who wanted to mass produce, right before that, it all had to go through NACA for approval by teams of aerial specialists. So, like, they'd create, like, wind tunnels to simulate different flying conditions, which, you know, is like, super handy in testing not just the aircraft as a whole, but, you know, the parts. So, like, if something was going wrong somewhere, they were like, oh, we need to fix the left phalange or whatever. So they would take into account wing geometry, air disturbance, etc. So you had all these different professionals, all cogs in this machine to make it work. Engineers, mechanics, physicists, and the most important group, well, the most vital group, mathematicians, otherwise known as computers. So raw data would be collected about, you know, the planes, what they were doing, the wind speed, yada, yada, yada. All this stuff, all this raw data is taken together. The mathematicians, their computations turned it into readable data for engineers to evaluate. Because knowing the numbers is fine, but you need to know what the numbers mean. So up until 1935, the math involved in aerial science was only done by male computers, right? Then they started hiring women. As it turns out, in a crazy, random happenstance, female computers were just as good, if not better than their male counterparts in mathematical calculations. Unsurprisingly, when men went off in massive numbers to fight In World War II, nearly all of the computers left were women. Even more unsurprisingly, these women were classified as sub professionals. Sub professionals. Basically. This ensured that they were paid less and were often left out of the history of the progress of aerial science. How convenient. It was beyond rare for a woman to be granted the title of mathematician. And they would have to really, and I mean really knock it out the park. They would have to excel and surpass male counterparts. They had to be the best all round. Nothing you can say can take them down. You're going to be the best around okay. And Catherine turned out to be one of them. So, like, here's the thing. It's. It's like the whole thing about man of science, right? So the word scientist exists because of a woman. Okay. So the thing about the word scientist is that the term used to be like man of science. It used to be man of science, but so it was like natural philosopher was a term for a while because they needed a term that if someone was a scientist and they had like many disciplines. So if you're like a chemist and a biologist and whatever, you know, typically if you were a man, you would be a man of science, but if you were a woman, there was no word for you. And so like a gender neutral term had to be made. And so scientists ended up coming from that. So, yeah, that's how, that's how things happen in the world. And so, yeah, Catherine becomes a mathematician officially. So Naka had been growing rapidly, like by the outbreak of the Second World War. So not just like in size, but in like the quality of what it was doing. So some of the most powerful warplanes had been produced thanks to their data output, test results and recommendations. So you had planes like the Corsair, the Douglas SBD Dauntless, the B24 Liberator. I have heard lots about B24s. I've also heard a lot about B17s. Right, so you've got the German Hellcat and the Boeing B17 Flying Fortress. Because they all have to have names. Listen, no, no shame, no shame. Like we once had a vote in our country to name a boat and we called it Boaty McBoatface. Like, you don't want to, you don't want to do that. You don't want to give people power because we will be ridiculous. So, yeah, Flying Fortress isn't actually that bad in comparison. I mean, the Liberator does seem to make sense in context, but like the Corsair. You named it the Corsair, like after pirates that you thought that. No, I'm not going to get into it. We do not need to have this argument right now. So in the 1940s, NACA was the creme de la creme of aerial science. And it was on top of the world, you know, because like post war, it was doing great. It was really booming. It had done all this amazing stuff, had all these amazing planes, all this great data. And then, oh, no, oh no, the Cold War happened, right? And then, you know, it's bubble was bust on 4 October 1957 when the USSR or the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into outer space. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial manual satellite to be launched into outer space. The Cold War space race had begun. The USSR piled on the pressure like it piled on when nearly a month later, they launched a dog into space on Sputnik 2. Her name was Laika and she was a very good girl. So Laika actually means like barker, like, like that's where the name came from. And she was sent into space. Leka, the Soviet space dog, was the first living creature to go to space and orbit the Earth. Well, orbit the Earth is generous because Sputnik 2, it orbited the Earth for 162 days before burning up on 14 April 1958. Now, Leica, she passed away within hours of the launch due to overheating. Not seven days as is often claimed. They're like, oh, she survived seven days in space all alone? No, no. Couple hours and she was gone. The bastards. Anyway, obviously this wouldn't do. The commies winning the space race? Hell no. Heck no. I don't know what's the heck. Could be 1940s. Yeah, let's, let's go with that. So everyone was chomping at the bit to be the agency to take on the newly planned space program. You've got like the US Naval Research Observatory, the US Air Force, and even the Army Ballistics Missile Agency. But NACA was the one selected to become the new center of the space program. And so in 1958, NACA becomes NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This program shifted from airplane research and design to developing spacecrafts and partially for the advancement of mankind and partially to rub the USR's face in it back in the USSR. I regret nothing. Back to Catherine. So she and her family, they up sticks and they move to Newport News and she applies for a job at NACA and gets accepted in 1952. So she gets the job, but she doesn't actually start till like the summer. So she's got a bit of downtime. So Catherine starts working with Dorothy Vaughan, eight years her senior. And what do you know? In a weirdly like crazy random happenstance, turns out their families had been neighbors like for a short time. So I think it was back when Dorothy was about 9, 10 years old. And what was it she would have been, Catherine would have been like one, two, you know, around about that. So Dorothy specialized in management and so would assign jobs to all of the women in her division. So that's in the west area computing. And two Weeks after Catherine started, she and another computer, Irma, were sent to the Flight Research division, a group that specialized in testing real planes rather than, you know, in wind tunnels. And she was sent there. So she and Irma, they are black women working with a whole bunch of white male engineers. And this is an era when black people are still fighting for their civil rights, right? Regardless of how, you know, brilliant minded or whatever these guys are, there's always going to be racial undertones. Especially when your society has segregation as the norm and has treated an entire race of people as less than. There's going to be underlying, like racism and bias there. So initially there's a lack of respect for these women. That is until these wetmill engineers realized just how vital they were. So Katherine's higher level maths was so on point that it just had to be acknowledged. Like you just had to accept that she was brilliant, you know, and six months in, right, she's still there, she's still a temp, technically six months in. And so the head of her division told the head of the Flight Research division to either give Catherine a raise or to send her back to them. But obviously she's brilliant, she's amazing, she's 10 out of 10. They don't want to send her back. They don't want to do that. Absolutely not. Katherine not only gets a raise, but she's also made a full time mathematician. Like, it's not just the maths, right? It's the practical application of the maths. Like not, not just the numbers, but what the numbers are used for. And a lot of what her division is doing is safety, like safety concerns and investigating plane crashes, which is just. I'm sorry, that's fascinating to me. So. So there's an investigation into a Piper plane that had crashed. And so she investigates like she's part of the investigative team and she discovers that the air disturbance is caused by a jet that had passed through the airspace earlier and that was the cause of the crash. And this led to changes in air traffic regulations, which we still use today. I or not we, but you, I mean, American airspace. Well, who knows now, but you did up until very, very recently. And that's all I'm gonna say on that matter. So this is all fine and well, but by the mid-50s, the space race is a cause for concern for the usa. And on top of this, Catherine's home life takes a turn. So we're gonna skip back and skip forward we bit. So they've been residing in Newcombe park for two years. And James wanted to move to, like, a more, like, upscale neighborhood. And so they do. That's what they do. And they're starting to reap what they sow. So they're moving into, like, a little bit more prominent area, you know, better funding, better housing, yada, yada. And so the following year, like, they're there for a year, and then suddenly James just starts feeling unwell. He's weak, he's in pain. There's just a lot going on. And he's got all of these just symptoms that don't seem to match up. It was then discovered that James had an inoperable brain tumour. And he passes away a few days before Christmas in 1956, after 23 months of constant pain and severe illness. So, like an over the course of just until two years, he just gets weaker and more frail, and it just goes on until he dies. And Catherine, she's lost her husband and the father of her children. And unfortunately for her, she's the breadwinner now. You know, food still has to get on the table and the bills still have to be paid. And so after a very short period of mourning, she goes back to work. Now, her mother, Joylette, she moves back in to help take care of her granddaughters. And Catherine, she's back at Naka in January of 1957, and she's getting back into the swing of things, you know, back hitting the ground running. And then 1958, she has another hurdle to jump over, all thanks to the National Aeronautics and Space Act. So when NACA becomes NASA.
- [40:29]
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- [41:31]
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- [42:07]
Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt)
When it was still Naka, Catherine had been in the west computing wing. But now that NASA was formed, this was being disbanded, right? Even like East Computing were being moved into different groups. Now on one hand that's good because it's the end of segregation at Langley. On the other hand, it's not good because Katherine was no longer a designated computer with West Computing. And Dorothy, well, she had spent years building up West Computing and was now left with a handful of black computers under a new boss in a different division. So everything she had built, everything she had proven like her group of women to be was just split up, gone, whew, whatever. But did they give up? No, they said fuck this for a game of soldiers. And they got going while the going was hot. So NASA's first few months into like its creation was full of new data. Analyzing, testing different wind tunnels and revising books that tailored to studying space aviation, right? This is all like their past fiction and they're now in reality. So Catherine, again, nobody should be shocked by this, but she is a very quick learner and super good at multitasking. And so she just starts studying everything she can related to space research and travel. So she's listening to aerial discussions with engineers, she's studying old charts on wind tunnel data, and she's reading all this different literature about flight. And so she's like absorbing and consuming all of this information. Again, it's not just the numbers, it's the practical application of the numbers. But where her like next hurdle is, this one is on fire apparently. Like, she has to try and understand the new mission because getting into lectures and to get into all of these meetings, like it, it's, it's a closed room, you know, and only a select fewer come in. And like she's constantly turned down, like she badgers them, right? She consistently badgers them. And it's always like, girls don't go to meetings. Girls don't go to meetings. Which, okay, not actually a rule, you've just made that up. And eventually like she wears them down because there's no actual written down Official legal rule that stopped women going to meetings. And so she just chipped away until like she was able to get in because she's like, oh, I'm sorry, what is this, a new flavor of discrimination? Well, I've tasted that before, sir, and I'm coming in by the time she actually gets into the meetings. And then she just shows off just how fcking brilliant she is. Like, all of the men in the room are like, I'm sorry, what? Like they're amazed, they're astounded. And they're like, crap, she's really good. And they're eating their words. And so over the next three years, from 1959 to 1961, she is just powering through. Like there's a lot of high tension, there's accelerated work. And after successfully launching their own satellite, Explorer 1, at the end of 1958, NASA was just really nose to the grindstone, working on their next plan. The one thing they wanted to really beat the Soviet Union at, and that was putting a man in space and surviving. They want him to go into space and also live through the process. Like that's the goal, you know. Now her personal life is also taking a turn here too, because she meets and marries James Johnson, or like Jim Johnson, who was a veteran of the Korean War and a US army officer. So they get married, he becomes a stepdad. Super. Okay, back to her math life. So they are just constantly churning out numbers, they're trying to make this work. And then the USSR just sticks their o run. In September, they launch another one of their own satellites, Luna 2. And soon it was the very first to reach the moon before it crashed onto its surface. Naturally, the USA is pissed because they have had a satellite reach the moon. This is bullshit. They need to beat this. And so they began NASA's first official human space program, Project Mercury. The project was made up of seven astronauts, some of whom would go on to become quite famous, right? And become part of later projects too. So you had Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil Grisham, Walter Schura, Donald Slayton and Alan Shepard. Unlike the Soviet Union, NASA took a long time, a long listen. It was more systematic and reliable, right? So they wanted to do this to get into space. They wanted to actually make sure it was safe and not just fast. So a spacecraft model was carefully designed and created, while another group calculated the trajectories of the spacecraft leaving, orbiting and re entering the Earth. Because again, send man to space, bring man home, okay? Full circle. Not just send a dog to space to Die? Yeah, you heard me. So Catherine is part of the group which is calculating the trajectories of the spacecraft, right? And her first mission calculations would effectively bring her one step closer to making history. The trajectory analyst for Alan Shepard's mission, she and Ted Skopinski co authored determination of azimuth angle at burnout for placing a satellite over a selected Earth position. Basically a report laying out the equations describing an orbital space flight in which the landing position of the spacecraft was specified. What made this mission crucial was that Alan Shepard was selected to attempt orbiting the Earth. And that being the first official manned mission for the usa, all eyes across the world were fixed on the country and NASA. Catherine was well aware of that. It wasn't just the astronauts lives that were on the line, but the United States integrity. And so she was, I mean I'm going to stay fastidious, she was pedantic, she was meticulous, right? She took extreme precaution and diligently did all the calculations or all of her calculations for the trajectory and, and the re entry, double checking everything. She and her branch would get the spacecraft size, shape, dimensions along with like the atmospheric qualities of the Earth, the projected speed of the spacecraft and pressure readings, right? And so as he prepared to embark on his space Travel on Freedom 7, Alan Sheppard Catherine spent hours calculating data analysis and developing a report, even staying late to ensure that she finalized the mathematical equations. So whilst Project Mercury was underway, like things intensified, things intensified between the USSR and the USA because on April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man ever to enter space as he and Vostok1 spent almost two hours in Earth's orbit, right? So he goes up and on the 5th of May, after like delay after delay and this being postponed and whatnot, the United States finally launched Alan Shepard in Freedom 7 off of Cape Canaveral, Florida for America's very first taste in human space flight. So this was a suborbital flight, right? It lasted 15 minutes and NASA succeeded in the fact that Allen had some control over the Freedom 7 spacecraft, right? So Vostok 1, it was automatic, right? Like Yuri Gagarin had no like control over it. So on the 21st of July, Virgil Grisham and Liberty Bell 7 was launched and performed another 15 minutes of suborbital flight. But this ended with the sinking of the spacecraft, like so Liberty Bell 7 sinks just after Grisham's recovery. So this just gets like tit for tat. So in August the USSR retaliates with German Tiftov going to a day long orbital flight in the Vostok 2 spacecraft. And so this is just lighting a fire under the us, right? And they're just getting madder and angrier. And so they're putting more pressure on NASA to get things like changed up. They want to like boost it because they want to catch up to the USSR. So like a few years earlier, a year earlier, 1960, NASA was like about to get an upgrade. So they were going to get the first mechanized calculation machines. IBM. It's IBM. Does IBM still make things now? Anyway, so this machine not only calculated trajectories mechanically, but communicated the data between Langley and Cape Canaveral where the Mercury rocket was going to be launched. Now this was a problem for Catherine and a whole host of other people. So just as the first missions were commencing, which again almost threatened her role in the entire project, the early IBMs weren't really up to snuff, right? So, so NASA had acquired the first IBM computer which again was programmed to calculate the trajectory. But the manufactured computers were making mistakes. Now the machine was doing most of the computations of NASA, but because it was doing that computers, the human computers were not needed as much. However, the astronauts were hesitant as one would be in putting their lives into the hands of mechanical machines. The astronauts didn't trust the machines. We shouldn't trust Skynet. I'm just, I'm just putting it out there. So by the request of the higher ups, Dorothy and her remaining West Computing, right, they were called up along with whatever was left of East Computing to assist the machine. So they were basically acting as math programmers so that they could make the machines work better. They needed the human element. And so the new Analyze, Analysis and Computation Division, acd, which then with male computers, right, Dorothy, she ends up specializing in programming on top of her supervising, right? And she ends up getting a position as an expert fortune programmer. Like she was making sure that she was needed and fucking good for her. So John Glenn, right, Alan Shepard's mission had gone well, but in 1962, John Glenn, like, he's like, let's be extra careful. So he's taking every precaution. Like he is like double wrapping, you know what I mean? He's being super careful and he wanted to ensure that he was going to be okay and wouldn't die, you know, upon re entry and also wouldn't, you know, land in Soviet waters, right? So he had heard about Katherine Johnson, although her name, she's nearly JOHNSON since what, 58 because. Yes, so she had been Katherine Goble because obviously she'd married James Goble. And then when she meets Jem, like at NASA, so they end up dating for three years before she finally accepts his marriage proposal. And because she gets married, her name is now Katherine Johnson and that's what she's known as like, for the rest of her life. So as Katherine Johnson. Right. Glenn literally asked the engineers, right, to get the girl Johnson to run the same like equations that have been programmed in the computer, but by hand. Right, Right. So basically mechanically calculating. So basically like he goes, if she's good, then he's ready to go, right? So he's just like, no, no, make sure she checks all the calculations because, like, make sure she double checks it and make sure the machine's right, which I just love. He's like, no, no, the girl. Trust the girl. So he actually had refused to enter his spacecraft until the numbers matched the ones that Catherine had given. Like, until they were the same. He was like, not a chance. So on the morning of 20 February 1962, John Glenn took off in Friendship 7 and achieved not only one, not two, but three orbits around the Earth in a span of four hours and 55 minutes. So he had to manually pilot Friendship 7 when it came to re entry because the heat shield had like a couple of like wee issues when reentering. But he was in the spacecraft the entire time. Unlike the Volstok space program where the cosmonauts. So in America they had astronauts and the USSR had cosmonauts. So the USSR's cosmonauts had to eject with a parachute just before the spacecraft crashed. Right. So it would be very difficult to salvage, you know, the thing they sent into space. It's very much, it feels like it's more for show than it is for anything else, doesn't it? So not only did friendship7go, it also came back. So all thanks to Katherine Johnson's like superior calculations that had outdone the IBM machine. So following like John Glenn's mission, the Mercury project continued with a few more missions. So you had Carpenter have a five hour flight on Aurora 7 in May. There was a nine hour flight aboard Sigma 7 by Shearer and then that was October. And then Cooper had a 1 hour and 10 minute flight aboard Faith on the 15th May 1963, the last flight before Project Gemini started like the following year. So although the USSR had more time spent in space, you know, including sending the first Soviet woman in 1963. Yes, a female cosmonaut On 16 June 1963, the United States was much closer to landing the moon, which basically pushed them ahead of the Soviet Union. So Catherine, right, she continues with NASA taking part in the Gemini program. So she's also involved in. That's like 1963. She's involved in the spacewalk program from 64 to 66, the Apollo moon program from 66 to 72, the Skylab satellites, 73 to 74, and the Apollo Soyuz program, 1975, the joint mission that ended the space race, and finally the space satellite program from 1981 to 2011. So there are so many interviews with Catherine and there's one she does, I think it's like early 2000s. And she says that her proudest moments, you know, apart from John Glenn's mission, were the necessary calculations that she provided for the Project Apollo's lunar module, the trajectory for the Apollo 11 moon mission, and all of the backup procedures and safe pathway charts that she provided during the Apollo 13 incident. Like in her last assignment before she retired was working with the first space shuttles and Earth satellites in 86. So when she retired, Catherine had authored and co authored 26 scientific research reports over 33 years in NASA. She was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor. And this was in 2015 by President Barack Obama. And soon after she got the Congressional Gold Medal. So she lived her life, her daughters grew up. She was such a huge part of American space history, the science that had adventure and exploration. It was amazing. And she was married to Jim Johnson for 60 years. So he passed away at the age of 93 in 2019. And Katherine Johnson passed away at the age of 101 at her retirement home in Newport News on the 20th of February 2020. So by the time she passes away, she has three children, six grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren, and was solidified as an American hero, basically. What was it? There was a NASA administrator who said that her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten. And I think throughout history we've so often swept women under the rug and especially men, minorities, you know, they're brushed off, they're overlooked, and we don't see the work and the effort that they put in and how they changed the world. She changed the world. And here's the thing, like the Hidden Figures movie, it's drama and whatever, it's whatever, but you know, it's based on a true story. Not everything is fact, but you know, it follows a certain point. You know, it, you know, it has to condense everything down to a short thing. And I think it's a decent movie and that it gets the vibe of what it's trying to say. You know, especially I watch a lot of based on a True Story movies because history and a lot of them are bullshit. But this has the tenacity that I think the women have and I think it's amazing. And I, I really despise when we ignore the accomplishments of women. Oh God, I'm actually getting emotional about it. Right? I know they say, like, in order to be a good historian, you have to like take emotion out of it. And it's like, yeah, when you're looking at the facts, when you're putting them into context, you should be feeling something, otherwise you're a fucking robot. Like, emotions won't win, facts will win. But you need to understand history doesn't exist in a vacuum. And women like Katherine Johnson, like, they propped up the western world. And for a lot of these women throughout their lives, they just, they just didn't have equal rights. They just didn't have equal rights. Even now, rights are not equal because if you don't have bodily autonomy, then you don't have equal rights. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, Katherine Johnson just. And she's a woman who is more than just the sum of her work. And we do this all the time. We're like, oh, this person was either a parent or they were a scientist, or they were a mother or they were a mathematician. It's. They never like marry the two. As if people aren't multi faceted, you know? And so when it comes to Katherine Johnson, I wanted to ensure that I was talking about her personal life as well as her professional one, because it's, it's really easy to overlook it and it's really easy to dismiss one because of the other. And they do that. People do that. And I'm not going to fuck that for Game of Soldiers. But yes, an absolute hero to everyone, but specifically women in stem. It's Black History Month, so I was going to be talking about an amazing black woman. And I'm so happy I did, even though I'm losing my voice again because I talk too much. But yes, if you liked my retelling of Catherine's story, feel free to rate and review five stars. If you didn't like it, you can keep your mouth shut. I don't need to hear it. Okay? Okay. So any other news? Any other news? Follow the socials. Sharing is caring. Share the episode with everybody, please. It'd be amazing because I've noticed a few people have suddenly got podcasts Out. And I, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna like, hey, I've been here for a while and we're working on this. Can we just not do that right now? Can we just like, like, what is that all about? Okay, let's teach some people a lesson that history fckin matters. Okay. Anyway, that's just me being a petty B. But yeah, it is black history month and so yeah, let us, let us go to recommendation time for watching hidden figures or listen lesson. It was, it was gonna be happening. It was gonna be happening. We're going for hidden figures. Okay. And for reading Ring Shout by Fendelson. Jelly Clark. Jelly. Is it pronounced jelly? Jelly. Sorry. There's accents on it and I don't know whether what, what the language thing is for. I'm gonna spell it for you because it's D, J, E with an accent going down, li with the accent going up. So if it's French, accent grave followed by accent et gout. Yeah, that's. I don't know what other languages have accents apart from Irish. And ours all go the one way. They all just go. The fadas all just point in the same direction. So. Yes. And for listening. And for listening, you know what? Samantha Mumba. You go listen to some Samantha mumba. Listen, I. I love Samantha Mamba. I don't care. I love her. I don't give a fuck. I like people who are a little bit of a dick. So go listen to her. She's amazing. And so with that, I shall bid you good night. Adios. Au revoir, Vida Zen, my friends. Bye bye.
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