NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins joined the crew of the Crew Dragon-4 mission. She will travel to the International Space Station next April.
The first black woman to go to work on the ISS
Jessica Watkins will become the first black woman to join the ISS crew on a long-term mission, writes The New York Times.
Dr. Jessica Watkins is a geologist with an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, studying landslides on Mars and Earth.
She has collaborated with NASA science labs on various projects, including the Curiosity rover mission. Watkins became an astronaut in 2017, her maiden flight.
“Becoming an astronaut was something I had dreamed of for a very long time since childhood. But I definitely didn’t think it would ever happen,” Watkins admitted.
The American began training a few months before being assigned to the team. She performed a simulated spacewalk at the Space Center in Houston.
In addition, Watkins studied all the intricacies of the space station and science laboratory 400 km above Earth.
The crew, in addition to her, includes NASA employees Chell Lindgren (crew commander), Robert Hines (pilot) and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.
All four will spend six months aboard the orbiting laboratory. The mission is scheduled to begin in April.
Dr. Watkins said she hoped the trip to the space station would be an example for non-white children and especially non-white girls.
Only seven of the 249 people who have visited the ISS since its inception in 2000 have been black.
The first black woman on the ISS was supposed to be Janet Epps in 2018. But she was replaced by another astronaut for reasons that NASA did not explain.
And the first black woman to travel to space was May Jamison in 1992.
China first launched a woman into outer space
For the first time in the history of China’s space exploration, a woman astronaut entered outer space. Historic achievement conquered by Wang Yaping
Wang Yaping became the first Chinese woman in outer space
Members of the Shenzhou-13 mission aboard the Chinese Tiangong space station made a spacewalk. It lasted about 6.5 hours, during which time the astronauts completed all the assigned tasks.
The mission commander and the first Chinese spacewalker Zhai Zhigang, as well as his colleague Wang Yaping, went into outer space. She became the first female astronaut from China to go into outer space.
Recall that the first woman in outer space was the Russian woman Svetlana Savitskaya. She left the Salyut-7 orbital station on July 25, 1984 and spent 3 hours and 35 minutes in open space.
According to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), the Shenzhou 13 crew will make one or two more spacewalks, globaltimes.cn writes.
Earlier we wrote that Tom Hanks turned down the billionaire’s offer to fly into space. Hollywood actor Tom Hanks turned down an offer to fly into space aboard billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin suborbital rocket.
USA space woman ISS black astronauts
