I met the news of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket launch with a bit of an eye-roll this morning. Even though it put Van Horn, Texas (almost two hours southeast of El Paso), at the epicenter of seemingly every major news outlet — and Texas news is sort of my job — it had barely been on my radar.
Space tourism isn’t new. Blue Origin’s missions have carried more than 50 people to the edge of space — including those who have paid huge sums of money for the privilege.
I was slightly more interested after learning this trip was led by an all-female crew. And that they got the flight suits right — I’d written about NASA’s scratched plans for the first-ever all-women spacewalk in 2019 because there was only one suit ready in a woman’s size. The Blue Origin team also made arrangements to study wound dressing in space, in part to stick it to those who held the notion that menstruation should bar women astronauts from missions. Equality in the workplace, one not-so-small step for womankind.
However, most headlines leading up to Monday’s flight centered on the bigger celebrity names: Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez and Gayle King. I have nothing against those women, their opportunity to do something objectively incredible, or even the use of their starpower (as a former entertainment editor, I know the power of celebrity for tedious things, like inspiring investment in the dull scientific research it takes to get more people into space).
It all just read a bit .001%, at a time when I’ve been editing stories about girls being stabbed to death, women fearing they’ll die in pregnancy, and bills that could criminalize websites for hosting abortion information.
Then I saw Oprah Winfrey tear up watching her friend Gayle King overcome her flight anxiety, and my ice cold heart started to thaw.
I kept watching.
I heard in the audio that the women saw the Pink Moon, which felt like a cosmic inside-joke.
I can’t say Sanchez being the first to step out of the capsule, and immediately hugging Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos, did much for me. Call it the billionaireness of it all. Though maybe I should retract that after learning it was Sanchez’s idea for an all-female crew, and Bezos said yes, that it would be a first.
But then CNN interviewed Amanda Nguyen, who explained why she was holding a hospital bracelet in her hands. It was the bracelet she’d worn while being treated after she was sexually assaulted. She’d turned it into a “zero G” indicator, an object astronauts take on space flights to let go in the cabin to know when they’ve hit zero gravity, or weightlessness.
“I didn’t know if I would bring it, but I ended up bringing it and floating it,” Nguyen said to CNN. She also brought a written note of a “promise I made to myself that if I were to pause my astronaut dreams, and fight for rights, that one day I would return to her. And it says, ‘never, never give up.’”
I turned into a puddle.
I spoke with Nguyen for the first time in 2018 for a story marking the anniversary of the height of the Me Too Movement. I’d found that the momentum of the movement hadn’t fully translated into changing laws. But Nguyen and her work around survivors’ rights were an exception.
Nguyen wrote what would become the Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act in 2014 after she says she struggled to preserve her own rape kit. It passed Congress unanimously in 2016. And through Rise, a civil rights nonprofit she founded, at least 21 more of those bills passed, impacting 40 million people.
I met her in person in 2019, as Rise launched an incubator program to train activists to compose and pass legislation. We talked about a lot of things, including pivoting her career prospects and if she’d ever go back to the scientific field.
Nguyen was a senior at Harvard University studying astrophysics and government when she was raped at a frat party. She’d interned at NASA, and was being recruited by the CIA. As she describes in her new memoir, Saving Five, the faulty systems of handling sexual violence in this country left her in a Catch-22 of pursuing her career or justice.
In an interview with CBS hours before the flight Monday, each of the mission’s women shared one word of what the flight meant for them. Nguyen said “justice.”
She explained that, when Neil Armstrong took steps on the moon, “bombs rained down on Vietnam. When my family looked at the sky they saw death. But tomorrow when they look at the sky they’ll see the first Vietnamese woman in space.”
To her, the flight signified that achievement is possible no matter who we are or where we come from. Or, as I understand her words, no matter what someone else has done to us.
“Dreams are important even amidst tragedy,” she said.
In that first piece that I wrote about Nguyen and Me Too laws, I described her as an “astronaut hopeful and full-time advocate.”
Hopeful no longer seems accurate.
One reason many people love space — studying it, rocketing into it, or just staring at it from their backyards — is the expansiveness that puts life into perspective. And the sheer possibility. What else is out there? What can we learn? Where can we go?
I just never expected that possibility to include healing from sexual assault, or as King told reporters, a push to “do better, be better human beings.”
On CNN, minutes after completing her dream, Nguyen shared this: “I just want all survivors to know that you can heal. No dream is too wild, and that if it’s so wild, out there, like going to space, you can absolutely make it through and it can absolutely be possible.”
Cue Defying Gravity, and a few more tears.