Every time engineers would hand me their equations to evaluate, I would do more than what they’d asked. I’d try to think beyond their equations. To ensure that I’d get the answer right, I needed to understand the thinking behind their choices and decisions.

I didn’t allow their side-eyes and annoyed looks to intimidate or stop me. I also would persist even if I thought I was being ignored. If I encountered something I didn’t understand, I’d just ask. … I just ignored the social customs that told me to stay in my place.

Katherine Johnson

Sputnik is launched from Earth on October 4, 1957. President John F. Kennedy, in September of 1962, nodding toward the Soviet Union’s achievement, announces an American space journey to begin immediately. Kennedy: “Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead-time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last… [Therefore,] I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

The year before Kennedy delivers this historical “Space Speech,” NASA’s engineers, working on Project Mercury, have already launched the first American traveling to space, astronaut Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7, in May. And months before the speech, in 1962, on February 20, astronaut John Glenn is the first American to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7.

There will be a race to the moon.

But despite the politicians’ national interests during the Cold War era, most people flocking to NASA to work as engineers, astronauts, or “computers,” did so to continue exploring what it means to be human.

I’m a Trekkie since 1966, beginning with the appearance of the original Star Trek series. What I didn’t know back when I was a girl watching the Mercury flights, as well as a the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle flights, what most Americans in the era of legalized racial segregation wouldn’t have suspected is that an African American woman was there—not in the still racially segregated and all-male control room at NASA, no. Katherine Johnson is there.

It’s her brainpower supplying the “calculated trajectory,” lifting Shepard’s spacecraft from the Earth to the open space. Johnson is there for Glenn who, while in his spacecraft awaiting the countdown, specifically request that “the girl,” that is, the 44-year old Katherine Johnson, verify the numbers. The computers are fine, but Glenn trusts Johnson’s skills as a research mathematician! “If she says the numbers are good,” then I’ll go!

Katherine Johnson, even if not in NASA’s control room, has a front row seat, at her desk, within the Langley Research Center in Virginia.

**

On my living room wall, I have an image of Earth; in fact, I have the Apollo 11 photo astronaut Michael Collins takes while aboard the command module, Columbia. It’s an image of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the flimsy lunar module, the Eagle. As the lunar module is approaching it’s landing target on the moon. I have the photo someone about aboard Apollo 17 took of the Earth, the full-circle Earth, finally.

I have the “Earthrise” image first taken by Bill Anders, aboard the three-man crew of Apollo 8, launched in 1968. Anders is accompanied by Jim Lovell and the spacecraft’s Commander Frank Bowman. These three humans are the first to fly beyond Earth’s orbit.

On the way to the Moon, for a visit in it’s orbit—only—the men look out the window and see a sight that just astounds them. It’s Earth. It’s home. And the scramble is on to load the film in the camera and start shooting. The folks back home won’t believe their eyes!

Maybe wars will come to a halt! Maybe human being over here will see human beings over there. Maybe differences will be honored. Maybe…

The other night I happened to catch the POV Short, Earthrise, a documentary directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. It’s a story I’m very familiar with, having viewed most all of the documentaries pertaining to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs over the years.

While the crew aboard Apollo 8 zeros in on the moon, Anders grumbles that shooting photos of one crater after another is becoming pretty boring. After a time, one crater looks like the next. And then he turns and sees something blue in the blackness. It’s Earth. “Tiny earth,” says Anders. Like a “grain of sand.”

It’s 1968, and what a tumultuous year. American politicians fuel the Vietnam War with human beings. Corporations advance campaigns of aggression, dropping napalm on Vietnamese citizens and filtering lies to any American unwilling to hear the truth.

On April 4th, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated.

It’s now December and the astronauts, in the moon’s shadow, are taking pictures of Earth!

Earth appears to “rise” but not really. “It was very, very sobering,” says Bowman, “to see this beautiful blue marble in all this darkness.” What are national boundaries when you look at Earth? When asked, how significance was the “Earthrise” photo for humans, Bowman answers, “At least for an instant, in history, I believe that people looked upon themselves as citizens of the Earth.”

The documentary Earthrise lingers on one image I haven’t seen before. It’s an image of that “tiny Earth” that, once the camera pulls back, further and further away, Earth is but a speck of light among other specks of light in the expansive blackness of the universe. The tiny Earth, like a grain of sand.

“I saw the Earth and I realized how insignificant we all are,” Lovell reflects. “Just tucked away in space around a rather normal star, the Sun. How we’re just one of millions of stars in the universe.”

A pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan would say…

“We worked closely together to complete a mission,” Lovell remembers. “But down here, we don’t seem to be able to do that.”

Rather than missions to the moon or to Mars, says Anders, it would be best if humans back up. Maybe moving forward means moving back to confront our past and present, the damage we humans have inflicted on each other. On other living creatures. One the planet. Maybe it would be best if we “get our act together here on Earth.” Why bring our penchant for violence and destruction to another planet? Wouldn’t it be better to go to Mars, Anders adds, “as human beings, not as jingoistic Americans or Chinese or Russians.” Let’s do it! But “let’s do it as human beings.”

I can’t agree more. I wonder what Katherine Johnson thought when she looked at that photo of Earth. Would she have nodded because the image of that marble circle surrounded in blackness would have validated her views of herself, her “race,” and all the other humans fighting to deny the right of hierarchical categories to control how we respond to one another. To this planet, our home.

What part of Earth is Other—as in alien?

When the time came, Katherine Johnson was ready to became a fellow citizen in an international effort that ultimately reminded human beings of the fragility of Earth, our home.

**

Born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Johnson graduates at 18-years old in 1931. After integrating West Virginia University and receiving a PhD in Mathematics, she teaches math for a few years before joining what is then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1953—years before Sputnik launches and President Kennedy speaks to the nation about traveling to the moon, as “Americans” in a race against “Russians.” The NACA typically hired white women to serve as “computers,” math girls. When Johnson becomes one among the first black “computers” hired (Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan are “computers,” arriving at the NACA), she stands out.

Quickly becoming a leader, Johnson’s skills as a mathematician attract the attention of the men of NASA (BlackHistoryMonth.org.uk). For Johnson it wasn’t enough to just do the job and be done with it. She “wanted to know the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’ and then the ‘why nots.’ Other women didn’t ask questions. She did.” As a member of the Guidance and Navigation Department, the “computer” went to briefings when women didn’t. Believing herself human and capable of being more than a “computer,” spitting out numbers, Johnson asked if there was a “law” written that stated her presence would be prohibited.

Apparently no such law existed; it was just the way things are done! And why? Is this not a means of maintaining privileges for the few while controlling to warp the mindset of all?

In 1958, the NACA becomes NASA.

Johnson continues to provide key calculations for the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. In addition to her day-to-day work, she is the first woman to co-author 25-scientific papers.

Johnson retires from NASA in 1986, but it’s not hard to recognize her 35-year tenure as representing, in a racist, sexist, and xenophobic culture, an encounter with the legacy of colonialism and enslavement.

Johnson is awarded for her work during and after her years at NASA, receiving numerous awards, including the NASA Lunar Orbiter Award, three NASA Special Achievement Awards, and the NASA Award for Mathematician of the Year, in 1997. President Obama, in 2015, awards Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2019, she receives the Congressional Gold Medal.

Katherine Johnson dies February 24, 2020, at the age of 101.

However, more and more black women who traveled the journey to enter science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, and who now sit at their desks, as employees of NASA, in national as well as international sites. Johnson’s legacy continues with many more younger black women look on at her star shinning brightly—and demand to be!