![]() Johnson considered her work on the Apollo moon missions to be her greatest contribution to space exploration. "She gave us a new way to look at black history, women's history and American history." "The wonderful gift that Katherine Johnson gave us is that her story shined a light on the stories of so many other people," Shetterly said Monday. Shetterly told the AP that Johnson was "exceptional in every way." "It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work," Shetterly wrote. "Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations," Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book "Hidden Figures," on which the film is based. Johnson, a mathematician on early space missions who was portrayed in film "Hidden Figures," about pioneering black female aerospace workers, died Monday, Feb. 24, 2015 photo, Willie Mays, right, looks on as President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, in Washington. "Get the girl to check the numbers," a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn's orbits around the planet. ![]() In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space. "You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it." "Our office computed all the (rocket) trajectories," Johnson told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012. But her work at NASA's Langley Research Center eventually shifted to Project Mercury, the nation's first human space program. Johnson focused on airplanes and other research at first. Signs had dictated which bathrooms the women could use. Johnson and other black women initially worked in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Virginia, that wasn't officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Johnson was one of the "computers" who solved equations by hand during NASA's early years and those of its precursor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement that Johnson "helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color." Johnson died Monday of natural causes at a retirement community in Newport News, Virginia, family attorney Donyale Y.
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