Mary Golda Ross (Cherokee – 1908-2008) Aerospace Pioneer
Mary was born in Park Hill, Oklahoma in 1908. Her birthplace was near Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. She was the second of five children born to William Wallace Ross Jr. and Mary Henrietta Moore ross. Her great-great-grandfather was John Ross who was a Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.
As a young child she was raised in the Cherokee ways. She loved her Cherokee culture and history. In school she had many native and non-native teachers. Her math teacher was Cherokee. Mary went on to earn a Mathematics degree at Northeastern State Teacher’s College in Tahlequah in 1928. This college had been the site of the Cherokee Female Seminary. Funded by the tribe, it was one of the first educational institutions for women west of the Mississippi River.
Mary taught mathematics and science for nearly 10 years in public schools. Then in 1937 she accepted a position at the Santa Fe Indian School as an advisor to girl students. This government run boarding school for Native American children was a lonely place for the girls. Their parents were glad that their daughters had some Native teachers to advise them. As a teacher Mary stressed the Cherokee values of education, working cooperatively, remaining humble and helping ensure equal opportunity and education for all.
During her summers, Mary took some graduate course work and eventually earned a master’s degree in mathematics. She said, “the world is so technical, if you plan to work in it, a math background will let you go farther and faster.”[1] She loved to educate others and took her own educational advancement seriously. It was a good thing that she loved teaching because back then employment was limited for women. Teaching was one of the few careers available to women. When WWII happened, opportunities opened up for women.
In 1942 Mary joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California, as a mathematical research assistant. She worked on designing fighter jets and large planes. After the war many working women returned to their homes partly to start their families but also to give jobs back to men returning from service. Mary stayed on at Lockheed. The company sent her to UCLA to get a professional certificate in engineering. She was the first Native American woman to accomplish this.
In 1952 she joined a group known as Skunk Works which was a secret Advanced Development Program. She worked on design concepts for interplanetary space travel, manned space flight ballistic missiles, and satellites for orbiting the earth. Her work was very important and much of it still remains classified to this day. She helped NASA (National Aeronautics and Science Administration) to write a book detailing space travel to Venus and Mars, Interplanetary Flight Handbook, Vol. 3 (1963).
Mary was working as a senior advanced systems staff engineer by the 1960’s. She helped with the Polaris reentry vehicle and the Poseidon and Trident Missiles. She worked on the Agena launch vehicle, which carried military, intelligence, and civilian payloads to space.
Agena-B rocket – The Agena-B upper stage was used during the 1960s as an orbital injection vehicle for Midas and other satellites and as an intermediate stage booster for Ranger and early Mariner space probes.
Mary retired from Lockheed in 1973. For the rest of her life, she was an advocate for the preservation and celebration of Native history and culture. She encouraged more Native people to get involved in the sciences. She supported the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). In 2004, at the age of 96, Mary attended the opening of NMAI. More than 25,000 Native people attended. Mary wore a green calico Cherokee dress that her niece had sewn for her.
Mary was a charter member of the Society of Women Engineers. She supported the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes. In 1992 she was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame. In June 2019 the U.S. Mint issued a Native American one-dollar coin featuring Mary with symbols from her work on space vehicles.
Mary Golda Ross’s legacy lives on in the technologies she designed and in the many people she inspired. Mary died only a few months short of her 100th birthday in 2008. She is buried in Ross Cemetery, Park Hill, Oklahoma.
Among the many commemorations of her life is a painting entitled Ad Astra per Astra done by artist America Meredith. A member of the Cherokee nation, America Meredith translates her title as “to the stars through the stars.” The seven-pointed star symbolizes the seven clans of the Cherokee.
A book for young people was written about Mary Golda Ross.
You can find it and many other wonderful books about Native People at the Social Justice Books site.[2]
A statue of Mary Golda Ross depicts the Native American engineer holding an Atlas-Agena model and a slide rule wrapped in a scroll engraved with the equation that describes the energy needed for a spacecraft to depart Earth and reach the orbit of another planet.
[1] From: “Mary Golda Ross: Aerospace Engineer, Educator, and Advocate” by Emily A. Margolis and Anya Montiel Feb.11, 2022
[2] https://socialjusticebooks.org/classified-the-secret-career-of-mary-golda-ross-cherokee-aerospace-engineer/
