Like Katherine and her colleagues at Langley, women at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland spent thousands upon thousands of woman-hours computing ballistics trajectory tables, which soldiers used to accurately calibrate and fire their weapons, as Jim Johnson had in Korea. The first attempt to put a man into space, NASA decided, should be a simple ballistic flight, with the capsule fired into space by a rocket like a bullet from a gun or a tennis ball from a tennis ball machine.
