Katherine Johnson: Mathematician of the Moon

During the height of the Space Race, NASA faced a challenge that no machine could solve alone:

getting humans safely into space and back. At the heart of this mission was Katherine Johnson,

an African-American mathematician whose brilliance was often overlooked. Dismissed at first

as “just a computer,” she spent hours calculating trajectory, launch windows, and return paths

by hand numbers so precise they would guide astronauts to the Moon and back.

Her calculations were critical for Apollo 11, the first mission to land humans on

the Moon. In fact, astronauts refused to launch until Johnson’s math confirmed

that their path was safe. Every decimal mattered; one mistake could have meant disaster.