Friday, November 8, 2024

Hundreds attend service in Hampton for NASA pioneer Katherine Johnson

A portrait of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson faces guests prior to a memorial service in her honor on Saturday, March 7, 2020, at Hampton University Convocation Center in Hampton, Va. Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers died on Monday, Feb. 24, 2020. She was 101. (Kaitlin McKeown /The Virginian-Pilot via AP)
A portrait of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson faces guests prior to a memorial service in her honor on Saturday, March 7, 2020, at Hampton University Convocation Center in Hampton. (Kaitlin McKeown /The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

Three black astronauts joined hundreds of other mourners Saturday at a memorial service for pioneering African American mathematician and NASA researcher Katherine Johnson.

Johnson, who calculated rocket trajectories and Earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures,” about pioneering black female aerospace workers, died Feb. 24 at the age of 101.

More than 700 people turned out for Saturday’s memorial service at the Hampton University Convocation Center.

“I think about the journey that she’s going on now,” astronaut Leland Melvin said. “We can’t calculate the speed that she’s traveling to get to heaven.”

Melvin was joined by fellow astronauts Yvonne Cagle and Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space.

Johnson was remembered not just as a pioneering researcher, but as a faithful church leader and family matriarch.

“Grandma, because of you, our world will forever be unlimited,” grandson Michael Moore said. “And because of you, I have no bounds.”

Her family received an outpouring of tributes, some of which were read during the service.

Former President Barack Obama, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, called her a “hero to millions” in a letter to her family. First Lady Melania Trump said she “took our nation to remarkable heights.”

Clayton Turner, director of NASA’s Langley Research Center, spoke at the service and presented Johnson’s family with the flag that was flying over the center when she died.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., said during the ceremony that he knew Johnson and her second husband, James Johnson, for years before he ever read Margot Lee Shetterly’s book “Hidden Figures” about Johnson and her colleagues’ work as “human computers.”

“There are few people who fought as good a fight, finished as difficult a course and all along kept the faith as Katherine Johnson,” Scott said.

Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, near the Virginia border. The small town had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, she told The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1997.

Until 1958, Johnson, Christine Darden, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson worked in a racially segregated computing unit at what is now called Langley Research Center in Hampton.

President Donald Trump last November signed bipartisan legislation cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine to award four the four scientists the Congressional Gold Medal for their work at NASA Langley in Hampton.

The award distinguished Johnson, Darden, Vaughan and Jackson, posthumously awarding the medal to the latter two, according to the senators’ offices.

The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian award in the U.S.

The Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act honored:

  • Katherine Johnson, who calculated trajectories for multiple NASA space missions including the first human spaceflight by an American, Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission. She also calculated trajectories for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission to orbit the earth. During her time at NASA, she became the first woman recognized as an author of a report from the Flight Research Division.
  • Dorothy Vaughan, who led the West Area Computing unit for nine years as the first African American supervisor at National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which later became NASA. She later became an expert programmer in FORTRAN as a part of NASA’s Analysis and Computation Division.
  • Mary Jackson, who petitioned the City of Hampton to allow her to take graduate-level courses in math and physics at night at the all-white Hampton High School in order to become an engineer at NASA. She was the first female African-American engineer at the agency. Later in her career, she worked to improve the prospects of NASA’s female mathematicians, engineers, and scientists as Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager.
  • Christine Darden, who became an engineer at NASA 16 years after Mary Jackson. She worked to revolutionize aeronautic design, wrote over 50 articles on aeronautics design, and became the first African-American person of any gender to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service at Langley.
John Mangalonzo
John Mangalonzohttp://wydaily.com
John Mangalonzo (john@localdailymedia.com) is the managing editor of Local Voice Media’s Virginia papers – WYDaily (Williamsburg), Southside Daily (Virginia Beach) and HNNDaily (Hampton-Newport News). Before coming to Local Voice, John was the senior content editor of The Bellingham Herald, a McClatchy newspaper in Washington state. Previously, he served as city editor/content strategist for USA Today Network newsrooms in St. George and Cedar City, Utah. John started his professional journalism career shortly after graduating from Lyceum of The Philippines University in 1990. As a rookie reporter for a national newspaper in Manila that year, John was assigned to cover four of the most dangerous cities in Metro Manila. Later that year, John was transferred to cover the Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines. He spent the latter part of 1990 to early 1992 embedded with troopers in the southern Philippines as they fought with communist rebels and Muslim extremists. His U.S. journalism career includes reporting and editing stints for newspapers and other media outlets in New York City, California, Texas, Iowa, Utah, Colorado and Washington state.

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