The engineers had actually taken the IBM 7090 and the orbital equations for a test drive on two prior occasions: once for Mercury-Atlas 4, an orbital flight using a mechanized astronaut “dummy” as a passenger, and then with the trained chimpanzee Enos at the controls of MA-5. Enos’ flight was ultimately successful, but it faced computer glitches and communications dropouts (in addition to more serious problems with the capsule’s cooling system and a faulty electrical wire). To mention that the stakes increased dramatically with a person on board was an understatement (if disaster did befall John Glenn, one secret military document proposed blaming it on the Cubans, using it as an excuse to overthrow Fidel Castro). Katherine Johnson, suffice it to say, was very nervous about the momentous task she had been handed.
For the entire project to succeed, each individual part of the mission—the hardware, the software, and the human—had to function according to plan. A breakdown would be immediate and potentially tragic, and broadcast live on television. But Katherine Johnson, like John Glenn, was not prone to panic. Like him, she had already gone through a simulation of the job in front of her. The moment that had arrived, despite the time pressure and the frenzy of activity surrounding her, felt somehow inevitable. Katherine Johnson’s life had always seemed to be guided by a kind of providence, one that was unseen by others and not fully understood by her, perhaps, but obeyed by all who knew her, the way one obeys the laws of physics.
Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations. Instead of sending her numbers to be checked by the computer, Katherine now worked in reverse, running the same simulation inputs that the computer received through her calculator, hoping that there would be “very good agreement” between her answers and the 7090s’, just as had been the case when she originally ran the numbers for the Azimuth Angle report. She worked through every minute of what was programmed to be a three-orbit mission, coming up with numbers for eleven different output variables, each computed to eight significant digits. It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work. At the end of the task, every number in the stack of papers she produced matched the computer’s output; the computer’s wit matched hers. The pressure might have buckled a lesser individual, but no one was more up to the task than Katherine Johnson.
February 20 dawned with clearing skies. No one who witnessed the events of the day would ever forget them. One hundred thirty-five million people, an audience of unprecedented size, tuned in to watch the spectacle as it unfolded on live television. Many Langley folks joined the Space Task Group down at Cape Canaveral to see the flight in person. Katherine sat tight in the office, watching the transmission on television.
At 9:47 a.m. EST, the Atlas rocket boosted Friendship 7 into orbit like a champion archer hitting a bull’s-eye. The insertion was so good that the ground controllers cleared Glenn for seven orbits. But then, during the first orbit, the capsule’s automatic control system began to act up, causing the capsule to pull back and forth like a badly aligned car. The problem was relatively minor; Glenn smoothed it out by switching the system to manual, keeping the capsule in its correct position the same way he would have flown a plane. At the end of the second orbit, an indicator in the capsule suggested that the all-important heat shield was loose. Without that firewall, there was nothing standing between the astronaut and the 3,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures—almost as hot as the surface of the Sun—that would build up around the capsule as it passed back through the atmosphere. From Mission Control came an executive decision: at the end of the third orbit, after the retrorockets were to be fired, Glenn was to keep the rocket pack attached to the craft rather than jettisoning it as was standard procedure. The retropack, it was hoped, would keep the potentially loose heat shield in place.
At four hours and thirty-three minutes into the flight, the retrorockets fired. John Glenn adjusted the capsule to the correct reentry position and prepared himself for the worst. As the spaceship decelerated and pulled out of its orbit, heading down, down, down, it passed through several minutes of communications blackout. There was nothing the Mission Control engineers could do, other than offer silent prayers, until the capsule came back into contact. Fourteen minutes after retrofire, Glenn’s voice suddenly reappeared, sounding shockingly calm for a man who just minutes before was preparing himself to die in a flying funeral pyre. Victory was nearly in hand! He continued his descent, with the computer predicting a perfect landing. When he finally splashed down, he was off by forty miles, only because of an incorrect estimate in the capsule’s reentry weight. Otherwise, both computers, electronic and human, had performed like a dream. Twenty-one minutes after landing, the USS Noa scooped the astronaut out of the water.
John Glenn had saved America’s pride! That he’d had to stare death in the face to do so only increased the power of the myth that was created that day. An audience with the president, a ticker-tape parade in New York, seventy-two-point newspaper headlines from Maine to Moscow. America couldn’t get enough of its latest hero. Even the Negro press cheered Glenn’s accomplishment. “All of us are happy to call him our Ace of Space,” wrote a columnist in the Pittsburgh Courier.
Nowhere, perhaps, was the hero’s welcome as warm as in Hampton Roads. Thirty thousand local residents turned out on a blustery day in mid-March to fete the men they had adopted as hometown heroes. Not since the end of the last war had Hampton seen such an exuberant celebration. Glenn rode in the lead vehicle of the fifty-car parade carrying the Mercury astronauts and their families and the top leadership of NASA. The motorcade departed from Langley Air Force Base and traced a twenty-two-mile route through Hampton and Newport News: along the shipyard, over the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge, down Military Highway, with throngs standing on the sides of every thoroughfare. The procession passed by Hampton Institute, cheered on by Katherine Johnson’s daughter Joylette and Dorothy Vaughan’s son, Kenneth. Tiny Christine Darden stood on tiptoe to see over the exuberant crowds.
The parade ended at Darling Stadium, the namesake of the oyster magnate whose creative entrepreneurship had brokered the land deal with the federal government for the Langley laboratory a half century before. Glenn ascended to the podium, grinning broadly as he stood behind a sign reading SPACETOWN, USA. The people of Hampton and Newport News beamed with pride. With the heart of the space program shipping out for Houston, the celebration was tinged with melancholy, but the cities of the Virginia Peninsula were determined to commemorate their legacy as the birthplace of the future. The city of Hampton changed its official seal to depict a crab holding a Mercury capsule in its claw, adopting the motto E Praeteritis Futura: Out of the past, the future. Military Highway, the town’s main drag since Hampton’s days as a war boomtown, got a new name: Mercury Boulevard.
John Glenn was a bona fide hero, but he wasn’t the only one being cheered. Word of Katherine Johnson’s role in Glenn’s successful mission began making the rounds in the black community, first locally, then farther afield. On March 10, 1962, a glamorous Katherine Johnson, bedecked in pearls and an elegant suit that would have made Jackie Kennedy proud, smiled from the front page of the Pittsburgh Courier. “Her name . . . in case you haven’t already guessed it . . . is Katherine Johnson: mother, wife, career woman”! (Below the feature on Katherine Johnson, another headline inquired: “Why No Negro Astronauts?”) The newspaper recounted the lady mathematician’s background and accomplishments with pride, detailing the report that sent Glenn’s rocket cone whizzing through the sky. Katherine accepted the recognition graciously: all in a day’s work.
She and some of the engineers turned out for the parade, enjoying the celebration, allowing themselves, perhaps, just a sliver of pride in having been a part of such an achievement. They watched for a while but didn’t tarry long. It was fine to celebrate past accomplishments, but there was nothing more exhilarating than getting back to work on the next thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO