# Who is the most underrated figure in the space race?

> Some of these people are on the mission patches and some never left the ground. Recognition and contribution came apart badly here.

*By YPB Team · Published August 23, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-underrated-figure-in-the-space-race*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Katherine Johnson** — score 1000/1000
   Calculated the trajectories for the first American crewed flights, and checked the computer's numbers for John Glenn.
2. **John Houbolt** — score 642/1000
   Fought his own agency for lunar orbit rendezvous, the approach that made a 1969 landing possible.
3. **Valentina Tereshkova** — score 569/1000
   The first woman in space, in 1963, twenty years before any American woman flew.
4. **Sergei Korolev** — score 568/1000
   Designed Sputnik, Vostok and the R-7, and was kept anonymous by the Soviet state until after his death.
5. **Dorothy Vaughan** — score 481/1000
   Ran NASA's segregated computing group and taught herself Fortran to keep her staff employed when machines arrived.
6. **Frances Northcutt** — score 374/1000
   The first woman engineer in Mission Control, who worked on the return-to-Earth trajectories used by Apollo 13.
7. **Charlie Duke** — score 374/1000
   The voice from Mission Control during the Apollo 11 landing, who later walked on the Moon himself on Apollo 16.
8. **Wernher von Braun's Team at Marshall** — score 374/1000
   The Huntsville engineers who turned the Saturn V from drawings into a rocket that never failed a crew.
9. **Margaret Hamilton** — score 240/1000
   Led the team that wrote the Apollo onboard flight software, and coined the term software engineering.
10. **Jack Garman** — score 240/1000
   The 24-year-old engineer who told Mission Control to ignore the 1202 alarm during Apollo 11's descent.
11. **Michael Collins** — score 240/1000
   Flew Apollo 11 and stayed in lunar orbit alone while his two crewmates took the steps everyone remembers.
12. **Bill Anders** — score 240/1000
   Took Earthrise from Apollo 8, one of the most reproduced photographs ever made, and rarely gets named for it.

Tags: space, nasa, astronauts, engineering