‘I Will Persevere’: The Journey Of Two African American Female Astronauts

The rigorous preparation required to become one of NASA’s astronauts is well-documented, requiring great mental and physical strength. Thousands apply for one of the few coveted positions, and Jeannette Epps and Joan Higginbotham earned one of them. While Higginbotham – the third African American woman to go into space — has retired, NASA announced in 2017 that Epps would become  the first African American woman to travel to the International Space Station where she would conduct research with far-reaching implications.

“Granted that the research that I’ll do is not my very own research, but I will be the hands and the eyes for the researchers here on the ground,” Epps explained. “And so as we get closer and closer to flight, we’ll learn more details about the different experiments that we’ll conduct on board the space station.”

Despite NASA’s announcement five years ago, Epps has not been to the ISS. In Oct. 2021 during a webinar hosted by Links, Incorporated – an African American women’s service organization that counts both women as members – Epps spoke enthusiastically about the work she anticipates doing while living on board the ISS.

Epps mentioned, “There’s been a lot of research done on rodents. A lot of the individual things that we do with the rodents are to help mitigate, for example, osteoporosis in human beings. That’s one of the major research items that came out of some of the studies of the international space station.”

Epps began to dream of a career in space after an older brother looked at her report card and remarked that she should consider becoming an aerospace engineer. The seed had been planted. In college she majored in Physics and completed her master’s degree and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.

She worked at Ford for two years as a researcher before the CIA recruited Epps as an analyst in the weapons nonproliferation group where she studied aircraft from other countries. Finally, she thought the time had come to apply to NASA. She did so in 2008 and was selected from a pool of 3,500 candidates.

Joan Higginbotham’s Russian Experience

During the virtual event, Higginbotham talked about her NASA journey and recounted an experience training with Russian cosmonauts.

The Chicago native said, “My classmates and I were some of the first astronauts to train with the Russian cosmonauts in Russia, and it was quite an eye-opening experience being an African American woman in Russia where someone like me wasn’t a common occurrence. And having women train with all the male Russian cosmonauts wasn’t that common either.”

One incident served as a stark reminder of the cultural and gender chasm she had traversed.

“There was an incident where we were training in Russia … and I needed to go to the restroom and there were no women’s restrooms in the training facility,” Higginbotham shared. “So, I had to use the men’s restroom while my translator guarded the door for me.”

For Black women who have excelled in one of the last bastions of white male dominance, Epps and Higginbotham have discovered core strengths essential to achieving.

“What I learned about me throughout this journey of becoming an astronaut is that I am determined, and I will persevere,” she stated. “It was pretty devastating to me when I was not selected as an astronaut on my first attempt because I had come too close, and it would have been really easy to let that setback prevent me from any type of forward progress. But I was really determined to do everything that I could do in my power that would give me the best chance of being selected to be an astronaut so, therefore, [I decided to go] back to school and I persevered.”