WASHINGTON D.C. – The women who contributed to getting Americans on the moon were honored Wednesday afternoon with Congressional Gold Medals.
House Speaker Mike Johnson presided over a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony inside Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol Building. The ceremony stems from the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act, which was signed into law in 2019.
Recommended Videos
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson represented the agency during the ceremony, which will honor the women who served as computers, mathematicians and engineers between the 1930s and the 1970s.
These women are often known as the “Hidden Figures of NASA,” after the 2016 book and movie of the same name. The stories told in the book and movie showcased Black women who made significant contributions despite racial barriers but were rarely talked about compared to other top figures of the Apollo era.
Among the women who will be honored:
- Dr. Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who helped calculate the math needed for the Project Mercury missions, the Apollo moon landing and the beginning of the space shuttle program. She died in 2020.
- Dorothy Vaughn, who supervised the computers, taught them computer programming, and later became head of programming for the Analysis and Computation Division at NASA-Langley. She died in 2008.
- Mary Jackson, a mathematician who became NASA’s first Black female engineer in 1958, analyzing data for aircraft flight experiments at NASA-Langley. She died in 2005.
- Dr. Christine Darden, a mathematician and aeronautical engineer who researched supersonic flight and sonic booms for NASA.
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: