NASA’s “Hidden Figures” honored in Congressional Gold Medal ceremony

Katherine G. Johnson (photo NASA) Dorothy Vaughn (photo NASA) Washington — A group of Black women central to NASA’s success during the space race and known as the “Hidden Figures” were honored Wednesday in a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony on Capitol Hill. “This has been a long time coming,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said at the ceremony. “At a time in America when our nation was divided by color and often by gender, these women dared to step into the fields where they had previously been unwelcome.” The “Hidden Figures” were considered crucial to NASA’s work from 1930-1970. They were mathematicians and engineers who played a role in the earliest American space flights — calculating rocket trajectories and earth orbits and helping to put men on the moon. Three of the women — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson — were honored posthumously. The fourth woman, Christine Darden, was honored for her work as an aeronautical engineer. Johnson credited the women for laying “the very foundation upon which our rockets launched and our astronauts flew and our nation soared.” “Although we call them ‘Hidden Figures,’ we shouldn’t think of them merely as supporting characters in the...