There is a photo of Annie Easley where she resembles Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) of “Star Trek” fame. While they were both beautiful, Easley’s involvement in space was real and not fiction.
In 1962, after the explosion of a rocket that was designed to compete with Soviet advances, NASA scientists and engineers worked fast to compensate for the setback. Easley was part of the team charged with fixing the problem, although she was still in college and not an engineer.
What she brought to the team was a mathematical genius that helped improve the insulation panels and why they were unable to stand the pressure of the flammable combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as a propellant. Her background in chemistry and math, to say nothing of an intuitive gift for solving problems, made her an essential asset to NASA, and another of the heralded “Hidden Figures.”
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Annie Jean McCrory was born on Apr. 23, 1933, in Birmingham, Ala., to Bud and Willie (Sims) McCrory, although in other places, Samuel Bird Easley and Mary Melvina Hoover are listed as her parents. She was valedictorian of her graduating class at Holy Family High School. At first, she dreamed of becoming a nurse, but later switched to pharmacy, inspired in part by watching a pharmacist at a local drugstore. She enrolled in the College of Pharmacy at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, but after two years in the program, she married Theodia Easley, who was in the military, and they returned to Birmingham. She then worked briefly as a substitute teacher.
In 1955, Easley came across a newspaper story about twin sisters working as “human computers” at a place that was to become NASA, it was then located in Cleveland. She drove to the facility and applied for a position at the Lewis Research Center. She was just the fourth African American employee there among the 2,500 members of the workforce. She began as a computer programmer, working mainly in the Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program and Formula Translating System (Fortran). Her skills were useful in the developing alternative power technology, and subsequently in understanding the function of batteries in hybrid vehicles.
Despite the bigotry and discrimination that pertained in the industry, Easley kept her eyes glued on the prize, and soon it was impossible to ignore how formidable her talents were. Her mother always told her, “You can be anything you want to be, if you work hard enough.”
A year after the 1962 rocket explosion, the team had redesigned the system and there was a successful launch; it inaugurated a new space mission and Easley’s calculations played a critical role. For the next generation, she was part of various initiatives, including Voyager, Pioneer, Viking, and Cassini. The Centaur (upper rocket stage) program she helped perfect was instrumental in nearly every facet of space exploration.
Even while she was indispensable at NASA, Easley earned a degree in mathematics during the 1970s, paying for the classes out of her own pocket, although NASA usually reimbursed their employees.
Toward the twilight of her career, Easley became a model for others, and was vital in NASA’s recruitment program, where she also tutored incoming students and was an onsite counselor for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), aiding in the elimination of discriminatory practices.
Easley retired after 34 years at NASA. She died in Cleveland on June 25, 2011, at 78. A decade later, the International Astronomical Union named a five-and-half-mile moon crater Hemisphere Easley. She was inducted into the Glenn Research Center Hall of Fame in 2015.