Eunice Smith was Katherine’s steadfast companion and confidante. The two of them spent more time together than many married couples, commuting back and forth to work each day, serving together as officers of the Newport News chapter of their sorority, AKA, taking time off from work to root for their teams in the yearly Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) basketball tournament for black colleges. They never missed Sunday service at Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church, and one night a week when they left Langley they headed over to Carver for choir practice.
One evening in 1958, a handsome thirty-three-year-old army captain with a ready smile and a rich bass voice ambled into practice. James A. Johnson, born in rural Suffolk, Virginia, had moved with his family to Hampton as an adolescent. He attended Phenix High School, and in fact Mary Jackson had been one of his student teachers. Jim Johnson had planned to attend Hampton Institute but was drafted right after graduating from high school. Rather than being assigned to the US Naval Training School there on the campus, he was sent to the US Navy Boot Camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. He trained in aviation metalsmithing, specializing in the repair of propellers. After his war service, Johnson finished his degree and landed a clerk job at the Commerce Department in Washington, DC, but he also signed up for the US Navy Reserve so he could spend his weekends at Patuxent River Naval Base in Maryland, repairing planes used for test flight. With the onset of the Korean War, he enlisted in the army, serving as an artillery sergeant, calibrating guns being fired on enemy infantry. In 1956, he returned to Hampton, taking a job at the post office as a mail carrier, maintaining his trim military shape through miles of walking each day. Never one to stray too far from the armed services, he also signed up as a member of the US Army Reserve.
“Ladies, he’s single,” the pastor had announced in church that Sunday after introducing Jim as a new member of the congregation. It hadn’t been Katherine’s expectation or intention to find a new love, but almost immediately after meeting in the choir loft, she and Jim began courting, tentatively turning up together at dances and dinner parties and arriving together at church as a family, with Kathy and Connie in tow.
Jim’s devotion to the military service made it easy for him to understand Katherine’s strong commitment to her work at Langley. He knew the satisfaction that came from fulfilling employment and loved the sense of mission and camaraderie that the military gave him. As a black man, he relished the opportunity to step forward from the cook and steward and laborer jobs that had traditionally been reserved for blacks and gain expertise in an area where he felt he could make a frontline contribution.
He was also sensitive to the secretive nature of Katherine’s work and the longer hours her job now demanded of her. Since the end of World War II, the NACA had been an eight-to-four-thirty kind of place. Now, at the outset of the space race, leaving the building at ten o’clock would be a good night. In a less urgent scenario, NASA personnel might have taken a more NACA-like approach to the problem of space by conducting a careful, measured investigation of all possible options for space travel and recommending the ones with the greatest long-term potential. There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government’s decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species. With the Russians off to what looked like a commanding lead, it was the simplest, fastest, and most reliable approach that began to take shape as NASA teased out the limitations, interdependencies, contingencies, and unknowns they faced. The engineers approached Project Mercury the way engineers tackled any problem: they broke Project Mercury down into its constituent parts.
The spacecraft itself, the can that would take a man into space, was the brainchild of Dorothy Lee’s boss, Maxime Faget. Aerodynamic theory and intuition suggested that the rocket and spacecraft combination should be as streamlined as possible, to minimize aerodynamic drag. Since the Wright Brothers’ 1915 Flyer, airplanes had evolved from pelican-like awkwardness to sleek machines with the silhouette of a falcon; why wouldn’t a spaceship continue along that same path? But tests by Harvey Allen, an engineer at the NACA’s Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, showed that needle-shaped structures wouldn’t be able to deflect the extreme heat caused when they zoomed through the friction of the atmosphere. A blunt-shaped body—something shaped more like a champagne cork—would create a shock wave as it came back toward Earth, dissipating the heat and keeping (they hoped) the man inside safe. Faget put Allen’s insight to work in the design of the Mercury space capsule, six feet wide and nearly eleven feet long, weighing three thousand pounds.
The selection process for astronauts would be limited to candidates small enough to fit into the lunchbox of a spaceship: only men at or under five feet, eleven inches tall and weighing less than 180 pounds were considered. Each was required to be a qualified test pilot under forty years old with at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1959, NASA held a press conference to present the “Mercury Seven” astronauts to the world. Four of the seven selected—Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and John Glenn—had graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, where Katherine’s new beau, Jim Johnson, had worked as a mechanic. NASA installed the astronauts in an office at Langley next door to the Space Task Group and proceeded to put them through physical training and classroom instruction in engineering and astronautics. Employees stayed alert to catch a glimpse of the Mercury Seven, who had gone from anonymous military men to among the most recognizable faces in the world. Computers working in the Space Task Group and the astronauts, whose office was located in the same building, often ran into each other going to and coming from the bathrooms.
The rockets NASA needed to blast spacemen and spacecraft into space would come from the army’s existing inventory of Redstone and Atlas missiles, overseen by Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The propulsion experts at NASA’s laboratory in Cleveland took the lead on the craft’s electrical system and the retrofire rockets built into the craft itself.