Katherine was selected in 1939 to be one of three black students  to integrate West Virginia University’s graduate school. She left after the first session to start a family with her husband.

She was hired by NACA (fore runner of NASA) in June of 1953. After two weeks, she was assigned to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division. She spent four years analyzing data from flight tests. Her first big NASA task was to compute the trajectories for Alan Shepard’s flight in 1961.

In 1961, she was the first woman to co-author a research report, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position”. In 1962, for John Glenn’s orbital flight, Johnson was specifically asked by Glenn to check the trajectories plotted by the new IBM computer. Johnson also worked in the Apollo program, performing calculations for Apollo’s Lunar Lander. She worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or co-authored 26 research reports. She retired from NASA in 1986. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2015.

Dorothy Vaughan

Dorothy Vaughan was born on September 20, 1910, in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her B.A. in Mathematics from Wilberforce University  in  1929. She  was  hired  by  NACA i n  1943  during  World
War II.

In 1948 she became NACA’s first black supervisor She served as the head of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ segregated West Area Computing Unit from 1949 until 1958. and later became an expert FORTRAN programmer. Dorothy died in 2008.

Mary Jackson

Mary Jackson was born April 9, 1921 in Hampton, Virginia. She received her B.S. in Mathematics and Physical Science from Hampton Institute in 1942.

She began working for NASA in 1951 as a computer. After two years as a computer, she went to work for engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. In order to become an engineer she needed to take classes at segregated Hampton High School. After petitioning the City of Hampton for permission to take the classes at the all white school, she received her engineering degree and was promoted to engineer in 1958.

She was NASA’s first African American female engineer, and, according to NASA, she may have been the only black female aeronautical engineer in the field.

Later, in 1979, after being unable to get a promotion into management-level grades as a woman,  Mary decided that she would take the position of Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager where she worked to impact the hiring and promotion of the next generation of NASA’s female mathematicians, engineers and scientists. She retired in 1985. Mary died in 2005.