Katherine Johnson, for her part, was determined to make this happen. She arrived at the office early, went home in the late afternoon to check on her daughters, and then came back in the evening, maintaining a schedule of fourteen- or sixteen-hour days. She and engineer Al Hamer collaborated on four reports between 1963 and 1969, some of them written to work out the all-important lunar orbits, others asking the question, What if? What if the computers went out? What if there was an electrical failure on board the spacecraft and the astronauts needed to navigate back home by the stars, like the
...more
