The whispered rumors now gained currency: the Space Task Group’s time in Hampton was coming to an end. The Langley employees, and the locals, campaigned with all their might to keep their brainchild from leaving home. Geography and politics had smiled on Virginia in 1915, when the NACA first went searching for its proving ground and aeronautical laboratory. As it had in the period leading up to World War I, the federal government made a list of possible sites for the headquarters for its space effort, looking for the right combination of climate, available land, and friendly politicians. In 1960, nine locations made the short list, but Virginia was not one of them. Due in no small part to the influence of powerful Texans, including now Vice President Lyndon Johnson, NASA decided to move the heart of its space program to Houston. Many of the Langley employees—the former NACA nuts, including Katherine Johnson—were going to have to make hard choices. They had come to love their home by the sea, from the abundant fresh seafood to the mild winters to the water that surrounded the lonely finger of land that had become such a part of them. Soon, they knew, following the president’s lead into space might mean choosing between the place that had given them a community and the passion for the work that gave their life meaning.
Over in Building 60 on Langley’s East Side, Katherine’s former colleagues Ted Skopinski, John Mayer, Carl Huss, and Harold Beck, who led the Mission Analysis branch within the rapidly growing Space Task Group, prepared for the move to Houston. Mary Shep Burton, Catherine T. Osgood, and Shirley Hunt Hinson, the math aides who ran the trajectory analysis software on the group’s IBM 704, also decided to go. Unless more Langley women volunteered to make the move, the members of the branch worried that their new office “was going to be badly understaffed” just as the workload skyrocketed.
Katherine Johnson had been asked to transfer to Houston with the group, but her husband, Jim, wanted them to stay close to their families. Resisting Houston’s call, not following the nerve center of the space program across the country, was difficult for Katherine and many of her Langley colleagues. It was “impractical” to recruit the mathematicians they needed in Virginia, so Mary Shep Burton and John Mayer went to Houston to recruit “five qualified young women” to come to Langley for training before setting up a permanent new computing pool in the under-construction “Manned Spacecraft Center.” The move echoed the establishment of the first computing pool at Langley twenty-five years before.
The residents of Building 1244 might have been staying put in Hampton, but despite their concerns, much work remained for them on Project Mercury. Alan Shepard’s flight was a triumph. MR-4, Virgil Grissom’s July 1961 suborbital flight, came and went in a flash.
NASA’s first orbital mission, and the debut of the all-important tracking and communications network, shimmered in the near distance like a heat mirage. Katherine and Ted Skopinski had laid out the fundamentals of the orbital trajectory nearly two years earlier, in their important Azimuth Angle report, then handed off the responsibility for the calculation of the flight launch conditions to the IBM computers. Like Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson knew that the rest of her career would be defined by her ability to use the electronic computers to transcend human limits. But before she crossed completely to the world of electronic computing, Katherine Johnson would tackle one last, very important assignment, using the techniques and the tools that belonged to the human era of computing. Like her fellow West Virginian John Henry, the steel-driving man who faced off against the steam hammer, Katherine Johnson would soon be asked to match her wits against the prowess of the electronic computer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Out of the Past, the Future
Sending a man into space was a damn tall order, but it was the part about returning him safely to Earth that kept Katherine Johnson and the rest of the space pilgrims awake at night. Each mission presented myriad pathways to disaster, starting with the notoriously temperamental Atlas rocket, a ninety-five-foot-high, 3.5-million-horsepower intercontinental ballistic missile that had been modified to propel the Mercury capsule into orbit. Two of the Atlas’s last five sallies had ended in failure. One of them had surged into the sky before erupting into spectacular fireballs with the capsule still attached. That wasn’t exactly a confidence builder for the man preparing to ride it into orbit, but it was the more powerful Atlas that would be required to accelerate the Mercury capsule to orbital velocity. The capsule itself was the most sophisticated tin can on the planet. The vehicle’s oxygen and pressurization systems stood between the astronaut and the life-crushing vacuum of space. Those functions and more—every switch, every indicator, every gauge—had to be tested and retested for any whiff of possible failure. As the rocket blasted from the launchpad and accelerated into the sky toward maximum velocity, the aerodynamic pressure on the capsule also increased to a point known as “max Q.” If the capsule wasn’t strong enough to withstand the forces acting on it at max Q, it could simply explode. A Republican senator from Pennsylvania called the Mercury capsule-Atlas rocket pairing “a Rube Goldberg device on top of a plumber’s nightmare.”
Everything rested upon the brain busters’ mastery of the laws of physics and mathematics. The mission was colossal in its scope, but it required both extreme precision and the utmost accuracy. A number transposed in calculating the launch azimuth, a significant digit too few in measuring the fully loaded weight of the capsule, a mistake in accounting for the rocket’s speed and acceleration or the rotation of the Earth could cascade through the chain of dependencies, causing serious, perhaps catastrophic, consequences. So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modeled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed.
Nobody, of course, understood this better than astronaut John Glenn. The former Marine test pilot had campaigned fiercely—and unsuccessfully—to be the first of the Mercury Seven to navigate to the heavens. Now, NASA had picked Glenn for MA-6, the orbital flight that would cast the die on the space agency’s future, and he was leaving nothing to chance. He pushed himself to his physical limit, running miles each day to stay fit, tag-teaming with fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter to practice water egress from the capsule in the Back River on Langley’s East Side. With the experience of Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom as a guide, NASA physicians worried a little less about the health hazards Glenn might face while on board, since in the capsule he would be hooked up to wires like a lab rat, his every vital sign transmitted to and monitored by the doctors on the ground. The specter of human error was ever-present, of course, so Glenn worked the simulators and procedures trainers obsessively, putting himself through hundreds of simulated missions, honing his responses to every failure scenario the engineers could imagine.
As a seasoned test pilot, Glenn knew that the only way to remove all danger from the mission was to never leave Earth. The former Marine was the first pilot to average supersonic speeds in a transcontinental flight. From Project Mercury’s outset, the NASA engineers had the delicate task of balancing the drive to get into space as quickly as possible with the risk they felt they could reasonably ask their human cargo to accept. Experience and analysis informed them that somewhere along this venturesome path they were certain to encounter unforeseen problems or run smack into the simple bad luck of statistics, that one time in a thousand when the worst-case scenario played out. What was within their control, however, they took pains to bulletproof, even if it meant stretching—then breaking—their timeline. Project Mercury’s first orbital flight was originally slated to take place at the end of 1960, on President Eisenhower’s watch. Additional testing and fine-tuning—a cooling system bug here, an oxygen delivery glitch there, the need to implement improvements based on previous unmanned and suborbital flights—conspired to push the date into the administration of incoming President Kennedy. NASA set July 1961 as the new date for the orbital flight, then rescheduled it for October, then to December. Finally the mission slipped into 1962.