CHAPTER 1 GET THE GIRL Everyone was watching her It was a chilly morning in February 1962 Katherine Johnson glanced up from her calculations to see a crowd of anxious white men surrounding her desk Each man was leaning forward trying to catch a glimpse of her work Her pencil danced across the graph paper She jotted long strings of numbers that stretched to impossible lengths Finally Johnson’s pencil stopped Her eyes darted across the numbers once and then twice With a sigh she smiled and leaned back in her chair Katherine Johnson The crowd of men inside the Space Task Group office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Langley Aeronautical Research Lab instantly broke up The room erupted into a frenzy of chatter Several men picked up their desk phones to report the news Johnson had confirmed the numbers That meant astronaut John Glenn would be safe to fly More than 850 miles away from Johnson’s desk in Langley Virginia Glenn nervously walked across the sun-baked launch pad in Florida’s Cape Canaveral
He looked up at a towering rocket On the very top sat a tiny metal capsule his spaceship Glenn was preparing to become the first American to orbit Earth If all went well his ship would zoom three times around the planet It would exceed speeds of 17,000 miles per hour That part wasn’t what was bothering Glenn He was worried about how or if he could get his ship back home Space flight was extremely precise It relied on countless complex mathematical equations If Glenn didn’t direct his ship back down to Earth at the exact right moment speed and angle he was doomed His ship could bounce off Earth’s dense atmosphere and skip out into space Or it would land in the wrong spot If it didn’t splash down in a deep ocean it could be crushed upon impact Glenn knew that NASA had used its new IBM computer to calculate the details of his flight This room-sized machine was supposedly able to perform calculations faster and better than any human But Glenn just didn’t trust it He was a test pilot A man who followed his gut Right now his gut told him he needed the best brains at NASA to confirm the numbers He knew who he wanted to do the job an African-American woman he’d seen in some of his preflight meetings He didn’t know her name but that didn’t matter He’d told his team Get the girl to check the numbers If she says the numbers are good I’m ready to go 1 Glenn understood that his behavior might raise red flags NASA expected him to toe the agency line He needed to follow orders He needed to perform his duties And he needed to help the United States win the race to space It was one thing for an astronaut to ask for a double check of numbers It was another thing entirely to ask for a black woman to do the job Just then Glenn looked up Two NASA technicians were jogging
