The Legacy of a Hidden Figure

By 1958, the year NASA was formally established, Johnson was known for her keen eye and precision. As engineers considered what it would take to send the first American beyond the edge of space, she volunteered for work behind the scenes. “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up,” Johnson told her boss. She ended up calculating the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s capsule from the time it lifted off the ground to the moment it splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1961.

Johnson was called on to do the same for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, the following year. This time, the equations that would control the journey had been programmed into actual computers, and the astronaut was a little nervous about entrusting his life to this newfangled technology. Glenn asked the engineers to tell Johnson to crunch the same numbers by hand and check them before the flight. They were correct. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go,” he said.

As the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated, Johnson contributed calculations that synchronized the Apollo 11 mission’s lander, which touched down on the lunar surface, and the command module, which remained in orbit around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored. Without these efforts, the first men on the moon wouldn’t have been able to find their way home.

Shetterly heard these and other stories of black mathematicians from her father, who worked as a scientist at Langley. During her early research for the book, the author shared some information about the women with experts on NASA history. “They encouraged what they viewed as a valuable addition to the body of knowledge, though some question the magnitude of the story. ‘How many women are we talking about? Five or six?’” Shetterly remembers them saying. By the time she finished her book, she had uncovered nearly 50 black women who had worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists at the Langley facility from 1943 to 1980, and believed that “20 more names can be shaken loose from the archives with more research.”

While Johnson and her cohort of “computers” didn’t get the recognition they deserved at the height of the space race, their work has become part of the mythos of American spaceflight. But their story is also an object lesson in how history is written—who is included and who is not. The legacy that Johnson leaves behind is not just the equations she worked to help send astronauts safely up into space, all the way to the moon, and back again. Her story also reveals who gets left out of the stories America tells about its accomplishments. If Johnson and her colleagues are remembered, but the next group of “hidden figures” remains hidden, then we have not remembered her well enough.

Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic.