While the astronauts got the headlines, the work of engineers and mathematicians on the ground made their journeys possible, and Johnson was one of NASA's most reliable members, a veritable rock star of putting people into space and getting them back down to Earth safely.
Johnson personally calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's journey into space, and before his historic first manned orbit of Earth, John Glenn requested that she check all the math IBM's electronic computers had performed on the orbital equations.
"If she says they're good, then I'm ready to go," he said at the time.