Northrop Grumman employees prepare to mate the company’s Cygnus spacecraft with its Antares rocket in the Horizontal Integration Facility at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Monday, Feb. 8, 2021 . Northrop Grumman named the NG CRS-15 Cygnus spacecraft after NASA mathematician, Katherine Johnson, a Black woman who time and again broke through barriers of gender and race. Her hand-written calculations were critical to America’s success during our first human spaceflight missions. Launch is scheduled for 12:36 p.m. EST, Saturday, Feb. 20, 2021, from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops. The Feb. 20 launch date also is the 59th anniversary of John Glenn’s Mercury flight in which he became the first American to orbit Earth. Glenn requested that Johnson verify the complex orbital trajectory calculations prior to his flight.
Photo Credit: (NASA/Patrick Black)