NASA Renames Headquarters After 1st Black Female Engineer

Mary W. Jackson will now be the new name of NASA’s DC headquarters.

Washington, D.C. (June 25, 2020) – The Washington, DC headquarters of NASA is getting a new name.  It will now be called Mary W. Jackson.  She was the first female African American engineer at the space agency.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine made the announcement Wednesday.  Jackson, who began her career in the 1950s in a segregated computing unit at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., overcame racial discrimination and gender bias to help propel the agency at the dawn of the Space Age.

Jackson’s story was profiled in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures,” based on a book by the same name.  Last year, a portion of the street in front of NASA’s headquarters was renamed “Hidden Figures Way.”