Continuing Space Week 2019 with "Counting on Katherine" by Helaine Becker and Dow Phumiruk (Macmillan Children's Books)

We're celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landings in style this week with a whole selection of awesome space-themed books.

This one's hugely important, as it chronicles the life story of one of the key figures in the space race, contributing a huge amount to ensuring that the Apollo missions went as smoothly as possible, even in one case keeping a cool head when disaster struck.

"Counting on Katherine" is a fantastic picture book all about Katherine Johnson, one of the human "Computers" whose maths skills and amazing level-headedness were vital to early space missions, calculating and projecting courses that spacecraft would take as they reached for orbit, and beyond to the moon.

Though she may not be as widely known as she should be, Katherine's contributions are lovingly detailed in this book, starting with her early life and her love of counting and numbers, through to difficult times as she struggled with racial inequality in America, before finally enrolling in college and being recruited as one of the "Human Computers" performing hugely complicated calculations as a contribution to the early NASA Space Programme.

There are some great moments in this book and of course Katherine's achievements are detailed - but I was very surprised that more wasn't made of her contribution to returning the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 - the mission to the moon that nearly ended in disaster as an explosion on board the ship put their lives in peril. Katherine was tasked with plotting a course to bring the men home safely - something you won't see in the movie (which is annoying) but is redressed here in a fab picture book that's hugely inspirational and important for all space fans - and for all kids who love maths and want to know what they can do with their amazing numerical brains.

Sum this book up in a sentence: A fantastic lifestory of a woman who deserves far wider recognition, a pivotal figure in the US Space Programme.

"Counting on Katherine" by Helaine Becker and Dow Phumiruk is out now, published by Macmillan Children's Books (kindly supplied for review).