08/24/2026
John Glenn refused to fly until one woman checked the computer's math by hand.
Her name was Katherine Johnson. NASA had electronic machines by 1962, and nobody fully trusted them. Glenn's instruction was blunt: get the girl to run the numbers. If she says they're good, I'm ready to go.
She ran them. He flew.
Johnson's trajectory work carried Alan Shepard into space, put Glenn in orbit, and helped bring Apollo 11 back from the Moon.
She did it while working in a segregated building, using a segregated bathroom, at an agency that called her a computer instead of a mathematician.
She died in 2020, aged 101. Obama had already handed her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Pencil beat processor.
