Women of NASA Langley Research Center

In honor of Women’s History Month and those who paved the way for them, hundreds of female staff – from artists to administrative support, educators to engineers, and scientists to safety officers – gathered in front of the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, on Feb. 6, 2024.

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”  Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

Shetterly wrote these words about Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Christine Darden, and Katherine Johnson, the first Black women who worked as mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, now NASA’s Langley Research Center­. These women were essential to the success of early spaceflight.

Text Credit: Sondra D. Woodward

Image Credit: NASA/David C. Bowman