Annie Easley

Annie Jean Easley was born on the twenty-third of April 1933 at Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of Mary Easley, a domestic worker who raised her two children alone. Mary Easley made clear to her daughter from her early childhood that any of the segregated school's restrictions were structural rather than personal limits and required her to complete every available unit of high school. She attended the Holy Family High School at Birmingham — the local Catholic segregated school — and graduated valedictorian. She enrolled at Xavier University of Louisiana in 1950 to study pharmacy.

She married and moved with her husband to Cleveland in 1954 — she intended to complete her pharmacy degree at one of the Cleveland colleges, but no local school offered the discipline. She read in a local newspaper in March 1955 a feature about twin sisters working as human computers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory at Cleveland. She applied for an open position the same day, was interviewed two weeks later, and was hired as a human computer at NACA-Lewis on the same day as her interview. She would remain at the centre — through its transition into NASA-Lewis and then NASA-Glenn — for the next thirty-four years.

She made the transition from human computer to programmer in the late 1950s with the introduction of the IBM 7090 mainframe and learned successively in the following decade FORTRAN, SOAP and COBOL. She joined in 1965 the Centaur upper-stage rocket programme — the high-energy liquid-hydrogen-and-liquid-oxygen rocket stage developed at Lewis as the upper stage for the Atlas and Titan launch vehicles. She wrote and maintained across the next twenty years the principal trajectory and energy-management software for the Centaur. The Centaur stage launched in those years the Surveyor lunar landers, the Viking Mars probes, the Pioneer 10 and 11 outer-planet missions and the Voyagers; her software is still the basis of the Centaur control systems that subsequently launched Galileo to Jupiter in 1989 and Cassini-Huygens to Saturn in 1997.

She earned the bachelor's in mathematics at Cleveland State in 1977 in parallel with her NASA work and led from the late 1970s the NASA Equal Employment Opportunity programme at Lewis.

She retired from NASA in 1989 after thirty-four years and died at Cleveland on the twenty-fifth of June 2011, at seventy-eight.

She is honored here as the programmer of the Centaur upper stage.