West Virginia State's president Dr. John W. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered admission. She left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. After only one year in the graduate program, Katherine left school to start a family with her husband. She returned to teach after her three children were all in school, but it wasn't until 1952 that she was told about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' Langley laboratory. Katherine moved her family to pursue this new opportunity. The woman in charge was Dorothy Vaughan, who soon assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch, where she worked for the next four years. While she was wrapping up her work on flight test data, her husband died of cancer.
The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history, and Katerine life. In 1957, Katherine
provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's May 1961 mission Freedom 7.In 1962 as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work for which she would become most known. Computers and calculators were used to control the trajectory of the capsule, but the astronauts were not convinced of their accuracy. As a part of the preflight checklist John Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl." Glenn said he was not ready for blast off until Katherine said everything was ok.
The movie Hidden Figures was based on Katherine and other black women that played an integral part in our space program. She was played by Taraji P. Henson in the movie. In 2015, at age 97, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.
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