Jessica Watkins will be the first African-American woman to spend six months in orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS). She will go there on a SpaceX spacecraft and be a part of NASA's Artemis program.
It is a multibillion-dollar endeavor to return people to the moon's surface by 2025.
NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-4 mission specialist Jessica Watkins participates in a training session at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA Adds 1st Black Astronaut to Stay in ISS For Six Months: Who is Jessica Watkins?
Space.com said Watkins graduated from the University of California with a degree in geology. She also graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in environmental and geological studies.
In 2017, Watkins was chosen for NASA's astronaut program. Her training began in August of this year and will continue for around two years.
The training includes scientific and technical teaching on the International Space Station's operations and knowledge on spacewalks.
Physiological training, experience flying T-38 supersonic planes, geology training, "expeditionary skills" training, and water and wilderness survival training were all part of the preparation. Previously, this survival training included activities such as camping (with an emphasis on survival instead of leisure.)
As part of her astronaut training, Watkins undertook another analog trip in 2019. As part of the NASA Extreme Environment Project Operations (NEEMO) 23 mission, Watkins worked as an aquanaut crew member in the underwater Aquarius habitat off the coast of Florida.
Watkins will make her first trip to orbit on SpaceX's Crew-4 mission. She will work as a mission specialist with Kjell Lindgren, a NASA astronaut and mission commander, Robert Hines, a NASA astronaut and mission pilot, and Samantha Cristoforetti, a European Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist.
This mission will transport the crew to the space station for a six-month stay. They will live and work while researching the orbiting laboratory's microgravity environment.
Watkins will become the first Black woman to complete a long-duration space mission with this expedition.
Why NASA Has Not Hired More Black, Brown Astronauts
NASA's most prominent personnel - the astronauts who actually travel to space - have remained predominantly white.
More than 360 persons have taken part in NASA's astronaut program. Only 15 of them have been black, accounting for only approximately 4 percent of all astronauts despite African Americans accounting for 14% of the US population.
Similarly, NASA has launched or enlisted 17 Asian and 16 Hispanic astronauts, thanks to collaborations with international programs like Japan's JAXA.
Asians make up about 7 percent of the population in the United States, whereas Hispanics make up around 18%. On top of that, just one astronaut has been of Native American ancestry, accounting for less than 1% of the total.
According to Futurism, NASA is still having severe issues with diversity in its astronaut corps.
While NASA has recently attempted to showcase its history of diversity, the truth remains that the famous Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flights were all crewed entirely by white men.
Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, the world's first Black astronaut, was launched by the Soviet Union rather than the United States in 1980.
However, how the space agency's diversity efforts will perform in the 2020s is a topic that remains unanswered.
Even 20 percent is a far way from the nearly 38 percent of non-white Americans. NASA's astronauts will not represent the population until that gap is closed.
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