From Joylette Coleman's Journey To Space

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On August 26, 1918, Joshua and Joylette Coleman was blest with a little baby girl name Katherine. She joined her family of three siblings and lived in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Katherine enjoyed school very much and was a very bright child. Working with numbers was her forte. She was a gifted mathematician. Katherine finished her eighth grade by the time she was 10 years old.
Her parents were so proud of her but it was hard deciding where Katherine would go to school. Her town did not have a school for African Americans after the eighth grade. Her parents decided she would attend the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. This school was 120 miles from their home but the family packed …show more content…

"Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, 'Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.” (Jackson, 1958) As a result, Katherine was responsible for the task of maneuvering the path for Alan Shepard's 1961 journey to space, the first in American history, fell on her shoulders.
"Everything is physics and math." - Katharine G. Johnson
The following task was to guide a man in orbit around Earth. This involved far more problematic calculations, to account for the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies, and by then NASA had begun using electronic computers. Yet, the job wasn't considered complete until Johnson was summoned to check the work of the machines, providing the go-ahead to propel John Glenn into successful orbit in 1962.
Until 1986, Katherine Johnson continued to serve as a significant contributor for NASA, helping to develop its Space Shuttle program and Earth Resources Satellite. Katherine Johnson after a long and distinguished career retired in

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