Annie Easley

Annie Jean Easley was born on the twenty-third of April 1933 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother, Willie (née Sims) McCrory, raised Annie and her older brother alone through the years of segregation, and she taught her daughter early that she could become anything she wished, provided she was willing to work for it. Annie took the lesson to heart, graduating as valedictorian of Holy Family High School before enrolling at Xavier University in New Orleans to study pharmacy.

After relocating to Cleveland, Ohio, she read of twin sisters working as "human computers" at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. She applied, and in 1955 began a career that would span thirty-four years, first performing intricate calculations by hand for the laboratory that would become NASA's Glenn Research Center.

As machines replaced the human computers, Easley mastered programming languages including Fortran and SOAP, developing and implementing code that analyzed energy-conversion and alternative-power systems. Her programming supported the Centaur upper-stage rocket, whose technology later helped launch spacecraft such as Cassini toward Saturn. In the 1970s she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Cleveland State University while working full time, and she gave generously as an equal-employment counselor and tireless encourager of young people in science.

Annie Easley died on the twenty-fifth of June 2011 in Cleveland. A crater on the Moon bears her name. May her steady brilliance and her open hand to those who came after be honored for as long as the stars she helped us reach still shine.