Katherine Johnson: How Women Evolved In The Space Race

How were women involved in the space race between America and the Soviets? In 1952, NASA hired black women to work as human computers. One of these women is Katherine Johnson. But things weren't always easy for these women, racial segregation and sexist segregation made it hard for these women to do their work and live their day-to-day lives. Just because Katherine Johnson and the other women at NASA faced challenges, it doesn't mean they didn't significantly impact history and the space race. Katherine Johnson was a very smart girl, she graduated when she was 18 from West Virginia State University. Then she started working as a mathematician at Langley Laboratory. Her job was to analyze data from flight tests and calculator data from the wind

Most groups sat together out of habit. For Dorothy and the west computers, segregated seating was required (Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures pg. 42). The women also barely got any credit for their work, even a woman who had worked closely with an engineer on a research report rarely saw her name on the final publication (Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures). Even when times were tough for the women at NASA, they still worked hard and did amazing things. For example, Dorothy Vaughan was another one of the women who did extraordinary things. She got an IBM computer to work and then continued to teach many of her co-workers how to use it, which saved those women's jobs. She recognized that the blurring of the color lines could put her and her team in a position to qualify for the desirable jobs that were going to be open up for people who were experts in managing the electronic computers (Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures pg - 114). Katherine Johnson also helped with the calculations that got Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin to the moon on Apollo 11. The moon landing was the peak of the space race and an important part of history, and it could have gone badly without the right