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Real Hidden Figures

NASA Headquarters Named After its First Black Female Engineer

Sourced from Getty Images. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC will be named after Mary W. Jackson, the first African-American female engineer to work at the aerospace company. Jackson, who passed away in 2005, started her NASA career in the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. She was a mathematician and aerospace engineer went on to lead programs influencing the hiring and promotion of women in NASA’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. In 2019, she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Donald Trump, along with her “Hidden Figures” contemporaries in Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Christine Darden. /* custom css *...