In the 1930s, three decades before Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon, Buck Rogers had his own Western-like space adventures — in the comics and on the silver screen. When NASA got off the ground in the 1960s, the first generation of astronauts looked like him: all white, just without a ray gun.
Half a century later, science fiction has shot to real-world space programs. There’s still Buck Rogerses in the 21st century, but there’s also Star Trek: DiscoveryMichael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and AndorCassian Andor (Diego Luna), characters who represent the diversity of the world in the way early science fiction and early NASA never really did. Such shows, as well as series such as The Expanse and Establishstill making strides ahead of the US space agency, which is now preparing to send the first woman and first person of color to walk on the moon in 2026.
“We have this Star Trek Margaret Weitekamp, a historian at the National Air and Space Museum, said visions of men and women of different races, first aired in 1966 amid the hurricanes. civil rights movement and the beginning of the second wave of the women’s movement. and the author of the book Space fever: America’s enduring fascination with real and imaginary spaceflight, out today. “That’s what became of the ideal, and we also know that it was used by NASA in the late 1970s to recruit a more diverse class of astronauts for the space shuttle program.”
Members of NASA’s first group of astronauts who had gathered before Journeys launch, they all look the same. Weitekamp points out that when those men were photographed together — they were all white, Christian, married, military-trained airplane pilots — they had to be in alphabetical order. so that commenters don’t get confused. Such an image would seem jarring to most people today, and even to some back then. But Journeys and its creator, Gene Roddenberry, have offered a very different view of the future – one that they hope can guide everything in the present. In the late 60s, Martin Luther King Jr. convince Nichelle Nichols keep playing Uhura Star Trek because, he said, “When we see you, we see ourselves, and we see ourselves as smart and beautiful and proud.” Nichols went on to launch a diversity campaign for NASA, shooting recruitment videos and traveling to universities in search of astronauts. In 1978, 8,000 Black, Asian, and Latino men and women applied to NASA’s astronaut class; Of the 35 recruits, there are six women and four people of color.
In 1983, long after the Apollo moon program, the United States launched its first American woman, Sally Ride, and its first black American, Guion Bluford—both members of the first class that Nichols recruited — into space. Europe first sent female astronauts into space in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union went ahead of everyone, launching the first woman and black man, Valentina Tereshkova and cosmonaut one after another. Cuban leader Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, in 1963 and 1980, respectively.
But while an increasing number of women and people of color have entered low Earth orbit and reached the International Space Station over the past few decades, they are still in the minority. Of the more than 600 people who have gone to space to date, only 75 are women and 18 are Black, 5 of whom are black women, led by Mae Jemison.
