Katherine Hidden Figures Quotes

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.

Besides, Katherine always expected the best, even in the most difficult of situations. "You have to expect progress to be made," she told herself and anyone else who might ask.

Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts' place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn't have traded places with the astronauts for all of the gold in Fort Knox. The men existed all alone out their in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. But given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.

But perhaps most important, Katherine Johnson’s story can be a doorway to the stories of all the other women, black and white, whose contributions have been overlooked. By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.

Katherine Johnson’s passion for her work was as strong during the remainder of her thirty-three-year career at Langley as it was the first day she was drafted into the Flight Research Division. “I loved every single day of it,” she says. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.” She considers her work on the lunar rendezvous, prescribing the precise time at which the lunar lander needed to leave the Moon’s surface in order to coincide and dock with the orbiting command service module, to be her greatest contribution to the space program.

The decision to prioritize a victory in space over problems on Earth was the most widespread criticism against the space program. But even those voices in the black community who expressed admiration for the astronauts, who supported the program and its mission, took NASA to the woodshed for its lack of black faces. No black television commentators, no black administrators, no black faces in Mission Control, and most of all, no black astronauts. Blacks were still smarting over the perceived mistreatment of Ed Dwight, an astronaut trainee who was given his walking papers before he could even report for duty. Though groups like ACD and Reentry Physics still employed several of the former West Computers, Katherine and others found themselves the only black employees in their branch. They were maybe less visible at work now that segregation had been ended. But they were perhaps more invisible professionally in the black community. The white NASA folks tended to live in enclaves, carpooling together and barbecuing together and sending their kids to school together. They talked about work and imported the hierarchies and nuances of their work lives into their neighborhoods.

attenuate the city’s hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me. That day after church, we spent a long while catching up with the formidable Mrs. Land, who had been one of my favorite Sunday school teachers. Kathaleen Land, a retired NASA mathematician, still lived on her own well into her nineties and never missed a Sunday at church. We said our good-byes to her and clambered into the minivan, off to a family brunch. “A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.” The

Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted. Not a morning dawned that she didn't wake up eager to get to the office. The passion that she had for her job was a gift, one that few people ever experienced.

It had always been Katherine Goble's great talent to be in the right place at the right time.

West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community. Katherine

What she wouldn’t have given for her father to see her—to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America. And

Katherine Johnson had given her best to her part of the grand puzzle, of that she was sure. The day was soon coming when the world would see if her best, if the brainy fellas’ best, if NASA’s best, was good enough.

Two vehicles and 238,900 miles: three days there and three days back. Twenty-one hours on the surface of the Moon for two astronauts in the lunar lander, while the service module circled the heavenly body in a parking orbit. Katherine knew better than anyone that if the trajectory of the parked service module was even slightly off, when the astronauts ended their lunar exploration and piloted their space buggy back up from the Moon’s surface, the two vehicles might not meet up. The command service module was the astronauts’ bus—their only bus—back to Earth: the lander would ferry the astronauts to the waiting service module and then be discarded. If the two vehicles’ orbits didn’t coincide, the two in the lander would be stranded forever in the vacuum of space. The leadership of the Space Task Group set a risk standard of “three nines”—0.999, a criterion requiring that every aspect of the program be projected to a 99.9 percent success rate, or one failure for every thousand incidences.

The Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it illegal to discriminate in the housing industry based on race, had lingered in Congress for years, vehemently opposed by legislators both in the North and the South. The bill only made it over the finish line in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. Katherine Johnson certainly knew all about the housing issue.

KATHERINE Here it goes. She turns the key in the ignition. Click, click, click. The engine whines, the car doesn’t start. DOROTHY That’s the starter. It’s definitely the starter. MARY That starter’s startin’ to make us late. We’re all gonna be unemployed driving this hunk of junk to work everyday. DOROTHY You’re welcome to walk the 16 miles. KATHERINE Or sit on the back of the bus.

Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations. Instead of sending her numbers to be checked by the computer, Katherine now worked in reverse, running the same simulation inputs that the computer received through her calculator, hoping that there would be “very good agreement” between her answers and the 7090s’, just as had been the case when she originally ran the numbers for the Azimuth Angle report. She worked through every minute of what was programmed to be a three-orbit mission, coming up with numbers for eleven different output variables, each computed to eight significant digits. It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work. At the end of the task, every number in the stack of papers she produced matched the computer’s output; the computer’s wit matched hers. The pressure might have buckled a lesser individual, but no one was more up to the task than Katherine Johnson.

Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden loved math. As children, they showed special skill in arithmetic, and they went on to study mathematics in college. After graduation they worked as teachers before going to work as “computers,” or mathematicians, for the government’s air and space program.