Mary Golda Ross

Mary Golda Ross was the first Native American female engineer. She was one of the 40 founding members of Skunk Works and known for her work on interplanetary space travel, manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights and the earliest studies of satellites at Lockheed Martin. Her work was critical to the Agena rocket project and she coauthored the top secret NASA Planetary Handbook about space travel to Mars and Venus. She said of her work, “We were taking the theoretical and making it real.” Though we’re not sure what’s in all those still classified papers she’s written, one thing is certain: she pioneered researched that jumpstarted the space race and changed history.