'Human computer’ Katherine Johnson opens Nasa research facility named in her honour

One of Nasa’s “human computers”, who helped plan the mission that saw an American astronaut orbit the Earth for the first time, has opened a new research centre named in her honour.

The key contribution of Katherine Johnson, 99, and other African-American women to the US space programme was recounted in the film Hidden Figures, which gave overdue recognition to their work. The film was the highest grossing Best Picture nominee at the Oscars.

The maths involved in the orbital mission was highly complex, and the computers of the day were prone to technical hiccups.

So as astronaut John Glenn was going through the preflight checklist – upon which his life depended – he insisted that Ms Johnson double check the calculations.

“If she says they’re good,” Ms Johnson remembered Mr Glenn saying, “then I’m ready to go.”

The success of the flight, during which he orbited the Earth three times, was seen as a turning point in the space race with the-then Soviet Union, which had previously been ahead after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to leave Earth and enter outer space in 1961.

But, as Ms Johnson was helping the US triumph over its Cold War adversary, racist laws were still widely enforced – the Civil Rights Act ending local and state segregation did not come into force until 1964.

She also had to overcome the sexist stereotype that women are inferior mathematicians to men.

But, at the opening of the Katherine G Johnson Computational Research Facility in Hampton, Virginia, Ms Johnson didn’t seem to get what all the fuss was about.

“You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy,” she said, when asked about the decision to name the facility after her.

She added that the decision “gives credit to everybody who helped”.

Others were happy to spell out what an important figure she was.

Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, said: “You have been a trailblazer. When I think of Virginia and the history of what we’ve gone through ... you’re at the top of that list.

“Thank goodness for the book and movie to come out, so people got to understand what this woman meant to our country.

“She really broke down the barriers.”

And David Bowles, director of Nasa’s Langley Research Centre, added: “We’re here to honour the legacy of one of the most admired and inspirational people ever associated with Nasa.

“I can’t imagine a better tribute to Mrs Johnson’s character and accomplishments than this building that will bear her name.”

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

30 show all Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

1/30 Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa

2/30 Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa

3/30 Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa

4/30 The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa

5/30 Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa

6/30 Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes Nasa

7/30 NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa

8/30 Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa

9/30 Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa

10/30 Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa

11/30 Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa

12/30 Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa

13/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa

14/30 Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa

15/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station

16/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts

17/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity

18/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago

19/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower

20/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it

21/30 Pluto image Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto

22/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta

23/30 Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3

24/30 Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU)

25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way

26/30 An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014

27/30 Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa”

28/30 Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan

29/30 Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere

30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

The keynote speaker at the opening ceremony was Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book Hidden Figures, on which the film is based, whose central character was Ms Johnson.

“We are living in a present that they willed into existence with their pencils, their slide rules, their mechanical calculating machines – and, of course, their brilliant minds,” the writer said.

“At every fork, her talent, her hard work and her character pulled her toward her destiny.

“At every turn, she made a choice to become the protagonist in her own story and then of ours.”

She told Ms Johnson that “telling your story has been an honour” and that she and fellow human computers Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan had been revolutionary simply by doing their jobs.

“Your work changed our history and your history has changed our future,” Ms Shetterly said.

Johnson had a fascination for numbers since her childhood in West Virginia, but said she never imagined where it would take her.

“I like the stars, and the stories we were telling, and it was a joy to contribute to the literature that was going to come out,” she said.

“But little did I think it would go this far.”