NASA LANGLEY’S NEW COMPUTER LAB USHERS AGE OF COMPUTATION

Back when “human computers” like Katherine Johnson calculated orbital trajectories and flight times for Mercury and Apollo astronauts by hand, some people still considered actual computers mere works in progress.

That’s why in 1962 a dubious John Glenn famously asked that Johnson run the numbers for his historic orbital flight to back up a NASA computer.

Now, NASA Langley Research Center is officially opening the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility — a $23 million consolidated computer center