Lockheed Martin, the successor company, has a corporate archive, but the degree to which it preserves individual-level records from classified programs of the 1950s and 1960s is not clear.

The accounts of colleagues who knew her during her Lockheed career have been collected in various forms, but they are retrospective — gathered decades after the work was done, by people whose memories of specific contributions and specific projects are necessarily imperfect.

The result is that the reconstruction of her career is based on a combination of the technical publications she is listed on, the general knowledge of what Lockheed’s advanced development work entailed during the period she was there, and the contextual information provided by colleagues and by her own later accounts.

That combination is enough to establish the significance and the general nature of her contributions.