Nguyen became the first Vietnamese American woman, and the first Southeast Asian woman, to go to space.
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket with her historic all-female crew from the West Texas desert across the Karman line on April 14, carrying with her the promise she made to herself more than 10 years ago.
That promise was to one day return to space after pausing her astronaut dreams to fight for civil rights, a promise symbolized on the flight by a piece of paper on which she had written, “Never, never give up.”
The Harvard graduate studied astrophysics, conducted research for NASA, and worked on the last space shuttle mission, as well as NASA’s Kepler exoplanet mission.
Nguyen put her astronaut dreams on hold to fight for sexual assault survivors after being raped in 2013. She helped rewrite legislation, drafting the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, which was passed by Congress in 2016. She has spoken at the United Nations and founded a civil rights nongovernmental organization called Rise, which continues to fight for sexual assault survivors and against Asian hate.
Her work earned her a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and the title of TIME Woman of the Year in 2022.
“You know, I usually have nice words to say,” she said in a post-mission interview, showing she carried her hospital wristband on the mission. “But in this moment, I just want all survivors to know that you can heal. No dream is too wild, and if it’s so wild out there, like going to space, you can absolutely make it through, and it can absolutely be possible.”
Nguyen became the first Vietnamese American woman, and the first Southeast Asian woman, to go to space. She spent her short flight conducting three experiments, including a new ultrasound patch for MIT Media Lab Women’s Health Initiative designed to ensure constant musculoskeletal monitoring of astronauts, checking for things such as radiation risk and skeletal changes that can occur in microgravity, such as spine elongation.
The earthly applications for this patch include constant monitoring and early detection of breast cancer.
By T.J. Muscaro
