In 1958, the NACA officially becomes the headquarters for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The American space program begins. The Space Task Group includes engineers from the Flight Research Division and PARD. They name the first manned space program Project Mercury. Project Mercury’s goals are to investigate the human ability to function in space and to bring both man and spacecraft back to Earth safely.

While Virginians feel pride at the fact that they will host the team that sends the first men into space, this is also the year when Virginia’s public schools close. The state’s governor chains shut the doors of any schools that attempt to integrate under Brown vs. Board of Education. Thirteen thousand students find themselves sitting at home. As the barriers at NASA continue to be erased, the children of the employees there attend segregated schools.

Katherine, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan push their children to excel in school and concentrate on getting into college. They also keep up with social functions and appear regularly in the newspaper as  models of upwardly mobile and professional black families.

At work, Katherine tackles Project Mercury with her colleagues by breaking it down into its constituent parts. Airplanes have evolved since 1915 from awkward machines to more sleek ones. Spaceship research shows that the shape of airplanes won’t work for the extreme heat caused when rockets pass through the friction of the atmosphere. A blunt, cork-shaped body works better. Astronauts are chosen, in part, based on their ability to fit into such a small space. Each also has to be a qualified test pilot under the age of 40. Soon “the Mercury Seven” astronauts have been selected. They go from being anonymous military men to becoming the most famous people in the world.

Katherine helps calculate rocket trajectories into space. The workload is heavy. She works with her team members to do computing runs and she figures out where the astronauts have to take off from to achieve orbital flight safely. Her analytical geometry skills help her play an important role in the mission. Once again, she is in the right place at the right time.

The Space Task Group completes its work. Katherine gets to complete and put her name on the research report in 1959. Her paper is the first report to come out of Langley’s Aerospace Mechanics Division by a female author. Around this time, she also agrees to marry a man named Jim Johnson. She changes her name to Katherine Goble Johnson.