海角大神

Katherine Johnson can recall watching the Apollo 11 crew return to Earth after becoming the first men on the moon in 1969. While most of the country had moved on to celebrating a major Space Race victory, Ms. Johnson was nervously thinking of pilot Michael Collins.

"If he missed it by a degree, he doesn't get into orbit," the 97-year-old NASA scientist explains in a Makers interview. "I was going, Boy, I hope he got that right!" She laughs.

"And I was sitting there hoping I am right too."

Johnson, a black mathematician from West Virginia,聽, just one milestone in a 33-year NASA career where her skills shaped every major American space program from 1952 to 1986. On Tuesday, she is to be honored as one of President Obama's 2015 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.听

Johnson's contributions are older than NASA itself: she came aboard the聽National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA's predecessor, when jobs set aside for black candidates were opened to women in 1953. At the time, she was roughly $900 in today's dollars.

Johnson was hired as a research mathematician, but found that NACA's male employees "just wanted somebody to do all the little stuff while they did the thinking," she tells Makers, grinning as she recalls an era when "computers" were people, not machines.听

But that first step in the door was already a huge one for a young woman who had to leave her hometown, White Sulphur Springs, to find a high school accepting black students, followed by college at the historically black West Virginia State University, from which she graduated summa cum laude at age 18 with degrees in French and mathematics.听

At WVSU, Johnson's math talent stood out so much that one mentor, Professor聽W.W. Schiefflin Claytor聽鈥� only the third African-American to earn a Ph.D. in math聽鈥� , studying the analytic geometry of space.听But that wasn't enough to open up many post-college opportunities for a young black woman in the 1940s, two decades before , and Johnson wound up as a teacher and homemaker until her NACA hire.

At first, the woman who would later win the聽National Technical Association's Mathematician of the Year award and three of NASA's own Special Achievement Awards was assigned to an all-female unit doing calculations for male engineers. But Johnson was curious about the agency's space projects.听

"Oh, they聽felt terrible that here we sat and the Russians had a vehicle riding around looking down on you," she says of Sputnik.

Supervisors rebuffed her initial request to sit in on higher-level meetings, saying women never attended, but when she asked "Is there a law against it?" they relented聽鈥� and after meeting her, the all-male space research branch refused to let her go. Plotting spacecraft trajectories became her specialty, so much so that, when the calculations shifted to computers ahead of John Glenn's 1962 orbit, he demanded that Johnson double-check the computer's numbers before he boarded.

"We just ," she tells the Charleston Gazette-Mail of working before there were space textbooks (and later writing her own).听

Since then, NASA has explored multiple paths to bring more women and minorities into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. The agency has given grants to colleges training underrepresented STEM students, launched a site sharing to inspire the next generation, and, in 2013, introduced the first astronaut group made up of . The organization has sent 534 people to space, of whom .听

NASA also hopes to strengthen women's participation through the , which aims to communicate and apply its open data in innovative ways. The Datanauts' first class of researchers is entirely female.

"The lesson we wanted to pass on is that ," Beth Beck, NASA's Open Innovation program manager, told Fast Company.听

But nationwide, efforts to attract and retain women and minorities in science and engineering are struggling. Women make up around a quarter of the engineering workforce, , while African-Americans and Latinos make up 12 percent combined.听

Part of the problem is access聽鈥� not entirely different from Johnson's dilemma in 1932. Resource-poor schools, which are disproportionately attended by minority children, may not be able to offer as many advanced math and science courses, such as Advanced Placement classes.

That makes role models like Johnson, whom the President called "a pioneer in American space history," all the more important.

Other recipients of the 2015 Presidential Medals of Freedom include filmmaker Steven Spielberg, violinist聽Itzhak Perlman, and, posthumously, Shirley Chisholm, who in 1968 became the first black woman elected to Congress.听

"These men and women have enriched our lives and helped define our shared experiences as Americans," Obama said in a released statement.听

Johnson likes math's constancy, its yes-or-no accuracy. "Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology," she told NASA in 2013.

But NASA, on the other hand, has changed a lot. "NASA would not be what it is if not for you, Mrs. Johnson," the agency wrote in .听