Katherine Johnson receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work ushering in the age of human spaceflight.
And one of the brightest was Katherine Johnson. These women, though not the faces memorialized in crowded mission-control room photos or seen waving from catwalks before launching beyond Earth’s grip, were nonetheless stars in their own right. Now, decades after the work that should have made them legendary, the black women who helped put the United States in space are finally having their stories told. Those moments created titans in American history, such as rocket pioneers Robert Goddard and Wernher Von Braun, or astronaut adventurers John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.īut many of the actors in this play remain hidden in the wings. NASA achieved its most spectacular first steps in those days, making heroes out of men and women who dared to push harder, dream bigger, and be smarter than anyone before them.
And for yet others, space was a sign of profligate spending of time and energy on dreams, when reality desperately needed America’s attention. For others, supremacy in space was the answer to the Cold War. For many, space was a tantalizing promise of a wonderful future, beyond the strife of an increasingly divided Earth. In the heady days of the space race, the Mercury Seven astronauts were celebrities, and the Moon’s silver face seemed, for the first time in human existence, close enough to touch.
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