Congressional Gold Medals were bestowed on a group of Black women who dared to boldly go where no woman had gone before: the labs and offices of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration where pioneering mathematicians and engineers figured out how to slip the surly bonds of Earth.
Congress honored Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson on Wednesday for their long unsung work in the space race.
A fifth medal was also awarded to “all the women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and NASA between the 1930s and the 1970s,” and was accepted by Andrea Mosie, the Apollo sample lead processor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
