Mary Golda Ross

At age 96, wearing her "first traditional Cherokee dress" of green calico, made by her niece, she participated in the opening ceremonies of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Upon her death in 2008, she left a $400,000 endowment to that museum.

After retiring in 1973, Ross lived in Los Altos, California, and worked to recruit young women and Native American youth into engineering careers. Since the 1950s, she had been a member of the Society of Women Engineers. She also supported the American Indians in Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes.

Ross became a senior advanced systems staff engineer by the late 1960s, working on the Polaris reentry vehicle, Poseidon and Trident missiles.

In 1958, she appeared on the television show What's My Line?. It took some time for the contestants to guess that she was the person who "Designs Rocket Missiles and Satellites (Lockheed Aircraft)."

In 1952, she joined Lockheed's Advanced Development Program at the then-secret Skunk Works, where she worked on "preliminary design concepts for interplanetary space travel, crewed and uncrewed earth-orbiting flights, the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defense and civilian purposes." She worked on the Agena rocket project, and on preliminary design concepts for flyby missions to Venus and Mars.

Ross was hired as a mathematician by Lockheed in 1942. While there she began working on the effects of pressure on the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. The P-38 was one of the fastest airplanes designed at the time: it was the first military airplane to fly faster than 400 mph (640 km/h) in level flight. Ross helped to solve numerous design issues involved with high speed flight and issues of aeroelasticity. Although Ross preferred working on topics surrounding interplanetary spaceflight, she later said that "If I had mentioned it in 1942, my credibility would have been questioned."

She moved to California in 1941 to seek work after the US joined World War II, on the advice of her father.

She received her master's degree from the Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley in 1938, taking "every astronomy class they had."

At age 28, she took the civil service examination to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, D.C., as a statistical clerk. In 1937, she was reassigned as an advisor to girls at the Santa Fe Indian School, an American Indian boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In August 1938 she completed requirements for her master's degree from Colorado State College of Education at Greeley; she had attended classes in summers while she was a teacher. She took astronomy classes there in addition to reading extensively in her chosen field of mathematics.

When she was 16, Ross enrolled in Northeastern State Teachers' College in Tahlequah. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1928, at age 20.

Mary Golda Ross (August 9, 1908 – April 29, 2008) 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, crewed and uncrewed Earth-orbiting flights, the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defense and civilian purposes." In 2018, she was chosen to be depicted on the 2019 Native American $1 Coin by the U.S. Mint celebrating American Indians in the space program.