Katherine Johnson

The stars were always within reach for Katherine Johnson. Using her mathematics skills, she helped NASA send astronauts to the moon and returned them safely home. She also overcame racial and gender hurdles that helped make giant leaps for humankind.

One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory, or path, of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., had a safe trip. A year later she helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet, another American first. In 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11.

Yet unlike the white male astronauts she helped launch into space, no one knew of the groundbreaking work Johnson and other black women did for NASA and space exploration. It wasn’t until the 2016 release of the movie Hidden Figures that these women received widespread recognition.