My second grade class and I watched the small black and white television in our classroom on the morning of February 20 of 1962 as John Glenn launched in his Friendship 7 capsule from what was then, and later became again, Cape Canaveral, Florida. We didn’t appreciate the enormous effort so many put into the moment, nor the risks he took to become the first American to orbit the earth. To us it came as a moment of success within the backdrop of the competitive space race with the Soviet Union that dominated the news each evening on the same small TVs we watched after dinner with our families.
Today we are so often disappointed by heroes’ faults and failings that we demythologize them before they fall and break our hearts once more. John Glenn was different. He was a fighter and test pilot in a time when jets were made of raw power and autopilots were science fiction. He wore a bow tie when in civies and married a shy girl who stuttered. He was made of perhaps the “Right Stuff,” as Tom Wolfe wrote, but he was and remained unique. John Glenn went on to become a US Senator for Ohio, serving with distinction not seen today. At 77, he flew into orbit again aboard the Space Shuttle to show that age need be no obstacle to, well, anything.
As we later learned, thanks to the film “Hidden Figures,” there was another, long unsung, hero that day that I learned about 54 years later after that second grade day. NASA called upon one who was seen, at the time, as least likely to be considered a rocket scientist, Katherine Johnson, a black woman in a time when both disqualified her from the NASA limelight, but one with both unparalleled mathematic skills and persistence of her own to match.
There were problems aboard Friendship 7, and NASA needed to cut the flight from seven orbits to three. As depicted in the film, the calculations needed for the capsule to reenter were too difficult to process using computers available in the time allowed. Johnson was called in to do the calculations manually and confirmed for Glenn and all that the planned reentry would work. Katherine Johnson too was different.
She went on to compute the trajectory of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon and the path for the first lunar module to rendezvous with its command module. Imagine being called on to figure those out – on paper – for the first time. She retired in 1986 and later received the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her career trajectory probably made it possible for a friend of mine, another woman, to train shuttle astronauts on the use of its robot arm. She was later called in to consult when the shuttle repaired the Hubble telescope.
Today we watch as the world is on the brink of war, while billionaire space cowboys take junkets in the sky. We need heroes for our times.
