Jeanette Epps to make heritage as initial Black female astronaut to sign up for NASA ISS crew in 2021

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps will be making background in 2021 as the initially Black female astronaut to develop into a crew member on a mission to the Intercontinental Area Station.

The house agency declared on Tuesday that Epps would be joining Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada for NASA’s initially operational crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Williams, who will be embarking on her 3rd expedition, and Cassada, on his initial, have been assigned to the mission in August 2018. On Twitter, NASA’s administrator Jim Bridenstine mentioned that Epps is a “fantastic addition.” Epps responded with a online video sharing her many thanks.

Epps was chosen as a member of the 2009 astronaut class soon after earning her doctorate in aerospace engineering and performing for the CIA. She was slated to be part of a June 2018 ISS expedition ahead of the situation was all of a sudden handed onto fellow feminine astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, who turned the initial Hispanic girl to live on the ISS.

At the time, Epps’s brother Henry claimed that racism at NASA was the rationale for the change — a sentiment that Epps has never ever commented on publicly. NASA didn’t straight away respond to Yahoo Life’s ask for for comment, but responded in 2018 to Henry Epps’s promises, telling the Washington Put up, “Diversity and inclusion are integral to mission achievements at NASA and we have a various astronaut corps reflective of that strategy.”

NASA confirmed to CNBC that 6 Black Us residents have visited the space station in the previous, though none for an extended interval of time, building Epps the very first Black woman astronaut to make a 6-month expedition.

Epps has shared absolutely nothing but her exhilaration on Twitter, creating that she is “looking ahead to the mission” and sharing that exhilaration with her crew associates.

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