Katherine Johnson’s contributions to the Apollo 11 mission and beyond

By Fred Outten

WASHINGTON, D.C. — “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

These prophetic words were spoken by President John F. Kennedy (JFK) on May 25, 1961, in an address before a joint session of Congress.

JFK would further inform the public about his plan to land a man on the moon before the closing of the 1960s in a landmark public speech titled, “We choose to go to the Moon,” at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on Sept. 12, 1962, where he famously stated, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …”

This year marks the 55^th anniversary of the historic July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 mission that placed the first man on the moon and safely returned Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins safely back to earth.

We must also pay tribute to the brilliant work of mathematician, Katherine Johnson, the legendary African American woman at NASA, known as Woman of the 20^th Century, who helped to calculate the trajectory for the successful Apollo 11 flight to the moon, thereby helping to fulfill President Kennedy’s mission to the moon.

In 1959 at NASA, Katherine Johnson’s vital role was expressed simply when she told them, “Let me do it … Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up.” 

In her memoir, Katherine Johnson laid out exactly what her contribution to the Apollo 11 mission entailed, stating, “My job was in general the same as it had been in previous missions: to compute the orbit to the desired destination and back and compute the launch window, telling the engineers what time the astronauts would get to their destination and what time they would get back to earth.

“The calculations for the moon orbit were quite intricate because there were so many factors involved. “(p. 189) According to the book “Hidden Figures” that revealed for the first time the historic work of Katherine Johnson and the other human computer women at NASA during the Space Race, Katherine Johnson “ … 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.” (p. 248)

Katherine Johnson’s contributions to the space program were extremely instrumental to its success (including her mathematical brilliance against electronic computers) and led to ultimately helping the U.S. win the Space Race — from Alan Shepard’s historic first flight, to John Glenn’s orbits in 1962, to the calculation of the trajectory for the historic first successful crewed 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing and subsequent Apollo missions, to the Space Shuttle program and to the Earth Resources Satellite.

Even after her passing on Feb. 24, 2020, at the age of 101, Katherine Johnson’s work is used to further the success of space exploration to this day