The hidden figures of the space race were recognized with Congress’ highest honor at a medal ceremony Wednesday in Washington.

The Congressional Gold Medal was presented to the families of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden at the U.S. Capitol. Darden watched the ceremony from her Connecticut home.

Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, and graduated from what was then called West Virginia State College. She died at 101 in February 2020.

Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Gemini mission in 1961. The following year, Johnson performed the work for which she would become best known, when she was asked to verify the results made by electronic computers to calculate the orbit for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, which helped Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 — the nation’s highest civilian honor.

There is a statue honoring Johnson at West Virginia State University, in Institute. In July 2019, the NASA Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) facility in Fairmont was named in her honor.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who led the effort to rename the Fairmont facility, attended Wednesday’s event along with Johnson’s daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore.

“It’s been said that Katherine Johnson ‘counted everything,’” Capito said at the event. “But today, we are here to celebrate the one thing even she couldn’t count: the impact she has had on the lives of students, teachers and explorers.”

Capito continued: “Katherine proved to us that no obstacle is too high, if you work hard and believe in your goals. As a West Virginian, Katherine used her toughness and grit to surpass societal barriers and turn her dreams into a reality. Vaughan rose to become NASA’s first Black supervisor and Jackson was NASA’s first Black female engineer. Darden is best known for her sonic boom research.”

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — a precursor to NASA — hired hundreds of women to crunch numbers for space missions. The Black women hired worked in a segregated unit of female mathematicians at what is now NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.

A medal also was given to all the women who worked as mathematicians, engineers and “human computers” in the space program from the 1930s to 1970s.

“By honoring them, we honor the very best of our country’s spirit,” said author Margot Lee Shetterly, whose book “Hidden Figures” was adapted into a film in 2016.