In 1979, Mary Jackson organized the retirement party for Kazimierz Czarnecki, who was leaving government service after forty years. Two years prior, the facility that had been the bedrock of most of their work—the Four-by-Four-Foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, the third member of Mary and Kaz’s partnership—had come to the end of its service at Langley as well. In 1977, the tunnel that had been state-of-the-art technology when it began operations in 1947 was razed to make way for the National Transonic Facility, a 1.2 Mach, $85 million tunnel that was powered by cryogenic nitrogen.
