Jessica Watkins is about to make history when she becomes the first Black woman to join an international space crew. NASA has assigned astronaut Watkins to serve as a mission specialist on the agency’s upcoming SpaceX Crew-4 mission, the fourth crew rotation flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.
This will be Watkins’ first trip to space following her selection as an astronaut in 2017. Watkins joins NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Robert Hines, as well as ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, as a crew member for the Crew-4 mission.
Crew-4 is scheduled to launch in April 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a six-month science mission aboard the microgravity laboratory.
In an interview with The New York Times, Watkins said that she hopes her accomplishment will help children of color, particularly young girls, “to be able to see an example of ways that they can participate and succeed.”
“For me, that’s been really important, so if I can contribute to that in some way, that’s definitely worth it,” she told the NY Times.
Watkins was also aware of the history-making moment and told the paper that becoming an astronaut was “something I dreamed about for a very long time, ever since I was pretty little, but definitely not something I thought would ever happen.”
“It is certainly not lost on me that we’ve arrived [at] this moment in history. This moment is not as worthwhile if we are not able to focus on the job and perform well,” she further stated.
In 1983, Guion S. Bluford became the first Black American to go to space while Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to explore the galaxy in 1992.
