Only seven of the 249 people who have boarded the space station since it was founded in 2000 are black. Victor Glover, A Navy commander and test pilot who joined NASA’s Astronaut Corps in 2013, becoming the first black crew member on a regular, long-range mission to the station; His mission started last year. The six black astronauts who visited the space station before Mr. Glover was part of the shuttle crew who stayed for about 12 days.
In 1983, Guion S. Bluford became the first black American to go into space, and Mae Jemison was the first black woman to do so, in 1992. Ed Dwight, an Air Force pilot, was the first black astronaut to train at NASA, but he was not selected. in September, Sian Proctor, member of SpaceX4 Inspiration An amateur astronaut mission who goes into orbit but not to the space station, becoming the first black woman to pilot a spacecraft.
Janet Epps, a NASA astronaut, was the first black woman to live and work on the space station, in 2018. But she He was replaced by another astronaut For reasons not explained by NASA. He is still scheduled for a six-month mission as part of the crew of the first operational astronauts to fly Starliner capsule from Boeing to station. But the development of that capsule Years behind schedule. This summer, it discovered a faulty valve set in the Starliner’s propulsion system before an unmanned test launch, delaying Dr. Epps until the end of 2022 at the earliest.
Dr. Watkins completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles Landslide studies on Mars and earth. Work with NASA science labs, on projects including The Curiosity Mars . Rover MissionBecoming an astronaut, he says, is “something I’ve dreamed of since I was very young, but definitely not something I thought would happen.”
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