The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. has been named in honor of Mary W. Jackson, the first female African American engineer to work at the American space agency.

A NASA announcement explains that Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer with degrees from Hampton University, began her career at NASA working within the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency’s Langley Research Center. Before working at NASA, Jackson got her start at NASA's predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and made a name for herself within these agencies by analyzing high-velocity wind tunnel tests, eventually working as an engineer in NASA's Compressibility Research Division, its Full-Scale Research Division, the High-Speed Aerodynamics Division, and in the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division. Over nearly three decades with NACA and then NASA, Jackson authored or co-authored 12 technical papers. In 1979, after rising as high as she could within the agency, Jackson left the NASA to take a position as the Federal Women's Program Manager in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, where she also worked as the Affirmative Action Program Manager and helped to advance the careers of other women working in science, math and engineering. 

Jackson played a central role in author Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 novel Hidden Figures:The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. In 2019, Jackson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. That same year, the street in front of the NASA headquarters building was renamed Hidden Figures Way in honor of some of NASA's Black women mathematicians, including Jackson and NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan.

The Mary W. Jackson NASA headquarters building was designed in 1992 by Evans Heintges Architects and Kohn Pederson Fox.