Oklahoma hidden figure: Cherokee woman helped NASA put man on the moon

While the guys were quite literally shooting for the moon, a Native American woman from Oklahoma was quietly helping them get there.

“We didn’t know she was working on the space program and so on because it was all top secret,” said Evelyn Ross McMillan. “We knew she was an engineer there, but that was it.”

McMillan lovingly calls her father’s sister "Aunt Gold." But to the engineers at Lockheed, the company that helped NASA put a man on the moon, she was Mary Golda Ross, space engineer.

“You didn’t think of women and science,” said McMillan.

It wasn’t just her gender that set Ross apart, she was the first female Native American rocket scientist. Ross was born in Park Hill, Okla. in 1908. She grew up in Tahlequah, the Cherokee Nation capitol.