The Mother of Spaceflight

Reese Williams

This project explores the contributions brought by Katherine Johnson to the field of mathematics and space exploration. Katherine Johnson was an African American female computer for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). During the 1900’s calculators were not available. Thus, important computations were done laboriously by hand. The individuals who performed the laboriously task were called computers. Computers were typically African American women. As the civil rights movement and space race began upon 1957, the NACA hired multiple computers to speed the calculation process up. The computers at NACA, now the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), never were appreciated, recognized, or remembered during the segregated years of the United States. Hence, this project will bring forth the light and path that female African American, Katherine Johnson, paved for many minorities and, most importantly, the women of math and space science.

• Reese Williams, a current junior and honors college member, is diligently working to complete a degree in mathematics. During the summer of 2021, she completed a joint internship with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She is scheduled to graduate in the spring of 2023. After graduation, she plans on attending graduate school to obtain a degree in space science, astrophysics, or aerospace engineering.