Mary Golda Ross was the first known Native American female engineer and the first female engineer in the history of Lockheed. She was one of the 40 founding engineers of the renowned and highly secretive Skunk Works project at Lockheed Corporation. She worked at Lockheed from 1942 until her retirement in 1973, where she was best remembered for her work on aerospace design – including the Agena Rocket program – as well as numerous design concepts for interplanetary space travel, manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights, and the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defense and civilian purposes. Mary died in April 2008, several months before her 100th birthday, and left a $400,000 endowment to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
