Katherine Johnson working at Langley Research Center, Virginia, in 1962. Johnson (1918-2020) was a US physicist and mathematician, one of a number of African-American women hired to work as 'computers' at NACA (the predecessor to NASA). She worked at Langley from 1953 until her retirement in 1986. Over the course of her career, she calculated the trajectory of the 1961 flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, as well as working on the Apollo mission and the Space Shuttle Program.

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