The Mathematician Who Put Humans in Orbit

Quick answer: Why did John Glenn ask for Katherine Johnson before his flight?

In 1962, NASA's orbital calculations ran on IBM computers, and John Glenn wanted human proof. According to NASA, he asked engineers to “get the girl,” Katherine Johnson, to run the same equations by hand. Johnson remembered his bottom line: “If she says they're good… then I'm ready to go.”

Katherine Johnson started with counting. “I counted everything… anything that could be counted, I did.” She earned a math degree from West Virginia State in 1937, and a professor, W. W. Schiefflin Claytor, told her she'd make a good research mathematician and promised to prepare her. In 1953 she arrived at Langley in the segregated West Computing section under Dorothy Vaughan. Within two weeks she was loaned to an engineering branch and never really came back. When women weren't supposed to attend editorial meetings, she asked anyway; if you own the numbers, John writes, you belong where assumptions are set. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, often working backward from where the capsule had to land. In 1962, with computers now in the loop, John Glenn wanted human proof. He asked engineers to “get the girl” to run the equations by hand. If she says they're good, he said, I'm ready to go. Her own verdict: “I was just doing my job.”

Why it matters for leaders: Make your work auditable, sit where assumptions are made, and build a reputation that becomes part of the checklist.

Q: How did Johnson approach landing calculations?

A: Backward: “Let me do it… I'll do it backward and tell you when to take off.”

Q: How did Johnson describe her work?

A: “I was just doing my job,” and “My problem was to answer questions.” She stayed at NASA until 1986.

Read the full essay on Substack → https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-mathematician-who-put-humans

By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation