Dr. Joyce Neighbors, one of Alabama’s “Hidden Figures” who helped launch the American space program, died today in Huntsville. She was 89.

Neighbors was the first woman to join Dr. Wernher von Braun’s rocket team in a technical role in Huntsville in the 1950′s. A mathematician and graduate of Auburn University, she led a team that calculated the trajectory – or flight path – of the rocket that launched America’s first satellite Explorer.

It was a critical task that allowed von Braun’s team to fire the rocket’s upper-stage engines at the highest point of the flight, and it wasn’t easy to calculate, because no two early rocket engines were identical and no two fuel mixtures were exactly the same. Neighbors’ team succeeded, and she was asked to sign a now-historic mission chart alongside von Braun, Ernst Stuhlinger and other rocket pioneers. But Neighbors’ supervisor asked her to sign only her initials, because she was a woman. “They didn’t think it would be as authentic if I signed with a woman’s name,” Neighbors said in a 2018 AL.com interview.

Neighbors was born to a family living on a small farm in Randolph County, Ala. She entered Auburn University in 1950 and earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in physics. She later came to Huntsville with her husband, Bill Neighbors, who became a key figure in America’s Cold War struggle with Russia.

Neighbors eventually worked on Skylab and the Saturn rockets that would lift astronauts into space. She held a prestigious management position for an aerospace company in Denver. And along the way, she repeatedly faced the sexism of a time when a working woman was thought either a “quota” hire or taking a job a man could use to feed a family. “I was tolerated,” she said. “And sometimes I was not treated very well.”

Despite that sexism that even threatened her job at times, Neighbors persevered and had a successful career that included project budgeting, advising NASA center directors and working hands-on with space hardware.. “I turned into a tiger,” she said. “I turned into my real self. I never covered who I am again. I was never pushy, I never stepped on anybody. But nobody was going to step on me.”