As NASA's focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved, though still behind the scenes. This excited her, because if her first love was mathematics—counting everything as a child, from plates to silverware to the number of steps to the church—her second was astronomy, and the uncountable stars. A celestial globe now joined the calculator on her desk. She had to plot the trajectories of spacecraft, developing the launch window and making sure—as soon as humans took off—that the module could get back safely.

This involved dozens of equations to calculate, at each moment, which bit of earth the spacecraft was passing over, making allowances for the tilt of the craft and the rotation of the planet. She ensured that Alan Shepard's mercury capsule splashed down where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn in 1962 could return safely from his first orbits of the earth. Indeed, until "the girl", as he called her (she was 43), had checked the figures by hand against those of the newfangled electronic computer, he refused to go.

That checking took her a day and a half. Later she calculated the timings for the first moon landing (with the astronauts' return), and worked on the space shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite her 33 years in the flight research unit, for a long time she featured nowhere.

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