![]() The craft is packed with 8,000 pounds of scientific research equipment an supplies for the ISS crew. The Cygnus spacecraft will carry approximately 8,000 pounds of research, supplies, and hardware to the International Space Station during the commercial provider’s upcoming cargo resupply mission for NASA. What’s on board the supply ship The Northrop Grumman Antares rocket, with Cygnus resupply spacecraft onboard, is seen launching from Pad-0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Feb. Along with other Black female pioneers like Mary Jackson, her legacy continues to shape NASA to this day. She passed away last year at the age of 101. Her calculations were instrumental in the first flights to the moon and she had a long and distinguished career, working at NASA for over 30 years. Johnson, whose life and work was portrayed in the movie Hidden Figures, was a Black woman who started work as a “computer” at NASA in the 1950s, performing complex mathematical calculations by hand and joining the agency at a time when it was dominated by white men. The Cygnus spacecraft being used for this launch has been named in honor of space pioneer Katherine Johnson for Black History Month. Coverage of the ship’s arrival and docking begins at 3 a.m. You can also tune into NASA TV to watch the ISS astronauts capture the supply ship and install it onto the Unity module. The craft will travel to the ISS over the rest of the weekend and is scheduled to arrive at the space station at 4:40 a.m. The launch will be livestreamed on NASA TV, which you can watch either on NASA’s website or using the embedded video above. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft will be launched on an Antares rocket from Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. The launch is scheduled to take place at 12:36 p.m. We’ve got all the details on how to watch the launch live. According to NASA, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl” (Johnson) to check the same equations, but by hand, with her desktop mechanical calculating machine. The orbits were calculated by early IBM computers. Other highlights in the work of Johnson, who retired in 1986, was a fact-check for a 1962 mission that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. By her own assessment, one of her most significant contributions was working on the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. Her work also helped Apollo 11 land on the Moon in 1969. She was part of the team that calculated the trajectory of America’s first human space trip in 1961, undertaken by Alan Shepard. Thus began the definitive phase of her work. When her expertise in geometry got noticed, she became the only woman of the time to be pulled from the computing pool to work on other programmes. Soon after joining NACA, Johnson was assigned to the Flight Research Division. I had to be,” wrote Johnson, who went on to co-author many more research papers. “We needed to be assertive as women in those days - assertive and aggressive - and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. ![]() Johnson would eventually go on to become the first woman from her division to have her name mentioned on a research report. Janelle Monae (left) Taraji P Henson, (second right) and Octavia Spencer (right) introduce Katherine Johnson, the inspiration for the movie ‘Hidden Figures’, as they present the award for best documentary feature at the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, in 2017. “Then, of course, I’d ask why I couldn’t go myself, and eventually they just got tired of answering all my questions and just let me in to the briefings,” Johnson wrote. There wasn’t, and she started attending them. She was also told that women didn’t attend briefings and meetings, and asked if there was a law against it. Yet, until 1958, black staff had to eat separately and use washrooms separate from the ones their white colleagues used. NACA had a growing pool of black women “computers”. More Premium Stories > The barriers she faced, broke
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