![]() ![]() Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan (left)ĭorothy Vaughan is a Kansas City native, born on September 20, 1910. She and her husband have six children, eleven grandchildren, and currently live in Hampton, Virginia. Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, at 96 years old – the highest honor in the United States for a civilian. ![]() She is one of the most award winning aerospace technologists that has ever worked at NASA. Her work is respected collectively throughout the aerospace research community. And she was a indispensable part of the team on both Apollo 11 and 13. Astronaut John Glenn requested her personally to check his flight calculations for his orbit around the earth in '62. She calculated the flight window for Shepard's second mission in 1961. Katherine would go on to work on multiple space missions. And just one year later, she calculated the flight trajectory for the first American in space – astronaut Alan Shepard aboard the Mercury Seven. But in 1958 she would begin making history again, joining the Spacecraft Controls Branch as an aerospace technologist. Due to segregation laws, Johnson's group was required use different bathrooms and dining halls they even worked in a location away from their counterparts. They performed all of the necessary math calculations for any number of functions and projects where solving complicated equations was necessary - mostly by hand. Katherine worked in a team of women often referred to as computers. After making academic history, and teaching for a few years, she joined NASA's Guidance and Navigation department in 1953.
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