What she actually did
Ross spent the 1940s solving aeroelasticity and compressibility problems on the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, one of the first aircraft fast enough to run into the physics of the sound barrier. From 1952 she was one of forty engineers who founded Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects — Skunk Works — and the only woman in the room. Her work there covered preliminary design concepts for interplanetary travel, crewed and uncrewed Earth-orbiting flight, and the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defence and civilian use. She later worked on the Agena rocket and the Poseidon and Trident missile programmes, and co-authored NASA's Planetary Flight Handbook, Volume III — the orbital mechanics for missions to Mars and Venus.
Why you have never heard of her
Ross is invisible for a reason that is almost structural: the bulk of her career output is classified and remains so. She worked at a desk with a slide rule and a Friden mechanical calculator on problems she was not permitted to describe. Add to that a double erasure — a woman in 1950s aerospace, and a Cherokee woman at that — and the result is an engineer whose fingerprints are on the early American space programme and whose name appeared on almost nothing public until the end of her life.
Her life
Ross was the great-granddaughter of John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation during the forced removal on the Trail of Tears. She grew up in Park Hill, Oklahoma, and was sent to live with grandparents in Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, so she could go to school. She credited the Cherokee tradition of educating girls and boys equally for the fact that being the only woman in a room never struck her as strange.
She entered Northeastern State Teachers' College at sixteen and had a mathematics degree at twenty. She taught maths and science in rural Oklahoma through the Depression, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, took a master's in mathematics in 1938 — fitting in every astronomy course the college offered, because she was already thinking about space — and joined Lockheed in 1942 as a mathematician.
Lockheed sent her to UCLA in 1949 for professional engineering certification, which she obtained: the first Native American woman to do so. In 1952 came Skunk Works, then two decades of classified work on missiles, satellites and interplanetary trajectories. By the late 1960s she was a senior advanced systems staff engineer.
After retiring in 1973 she spent thirty-five years recruiting young women and Native Americans into engineering, through the Society of Women Engineers and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. At ninety-six, wearing the first traditional Cherokee dress she had ever owned — green calico, made by her niece — she took part in the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. She left the museum $400,000 when she died at ninety-nine.
“I was the only female. I was the only Native American. I just got busy and did the work.”— Mary Golda Ross
Things worth knowing
- One of forty, the only womanSkunk Works was founded with about forty engineers. Ross was the only woman on the team, and the specifics of her work there are still mostly classified.
- A slide rule and a FridenShe computed interplanetary trajectories with a pencil, a slide rule and a mechanical calculator — no electronic computer.
- She wrote NASA's interplanetary handbookPlanetary Flight Handbook, Volume III set out the orbital mechanics for flights to Mars and Venus. Mission planners used it for years.
- She is on American moneyThe 2019 Native American $1 coin depicts Ross alongside an astronaut and the Cherokee syllabary — honouring Native Americans in the space programme.
- Asked what made it possibleShe pointed to the Cherokee value of educating girls and boys the same, and to a childhood in which nobody told her mathematics was for other people.
Timeline
Graduates in mathematics at twenty from Northeastern State Teachers' College.
Takes a master's in mathematics, loading up on every astronomy course available.
Hired by Lockheed; works on the P-38 Lightning's high-speed flight problems.
Earns professional engineering certification at UCLA — the first Native American woman to do so.
Becomes one of the forty founding engineers of Lockheed's Skunk Works, and its only woman.
Works on the Agena rocket and the Poseidon and Trident missile programmes; co-authors NASA's Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III.
Retires and devotes herself to recruiting women and Native Americans into engineering.
Depicted on the United States Native American $1 coin.
What it means now
Ross worked on the trajectories that made Mars and Venus reachable, and did it on paper. She left her money to a museum and her time to the next generation. The $1 coin is the rare case of a government correcting its own record while enough people are still alive to notice.
