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Mary Golda Ross was the first known female Native American engineer. She helped propel the world of space exploration and remains one of the most prominent women scientists of the space age.
She was born in 1908 in Park Hill, Oklahoma. She was the great-granddaughter of Cherokee Chief John Ross, who led the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. As a child, her intelligence was quickly noticed and she was sent to live in the Cherokee Nation with her grandparents to attend school. She enrolled at the Northeastern Teacher’s College at 16 and completed her bachelor’s degree in mathematics at age 20. She went on to earn a master’s degree from Colorado State Teachers College and took many astronomy courses.
She taught math and science in rural Oklahoma for nine years. At 28, she took a civil service exam to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. as a statistics clerk. On the advice of her father, in 1941 she moved to California to find work after the U.S. joined World War II.
Lockheed hired her as a mathematician in 1941, where she began work on the effects of pressure on the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. This was one of the fastest airplanes designed at the time and was the first military plane to fly faster than 400 mph in level flight. Ross helped improve numerous design issues on the plane, including issues with aeroelasticity.
After the war, Lockheed sent her to UCLA for a professional certification in engineering. It was unusual for a company to keep a woman working for them once the war ended.
In 1952, she joined Lockheed’s then-secret development program Skunk Works, where she worked on preliminary plans for space travel, unmanned earth-orbiting lights and early studies of satellites. On this team of 40 engineers, she was the only Native American and only woman.
One of her most influential roles was as one of the authors of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III.
She retired in 1973 and moved to Los Altos, California, and spent her free time recruiting young women and Native American youth to pursue engineering. She served as a member of the Society of Women Engineers for many years as well. She was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame in 1992.
She died in April 2008, just months shy of her 100th birthday. More recently, she was featured as the Google Doodle on August 9, 2018.
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