Why Hasn’t NASA Hired More Black and Brown Astronauts?
>NASA is at the forefront of groundbreaking space exploration — but when it comes to diversity, it's falling seriously short.
https://futurism.com/nasa-black-brown-astronauts
Charles Bolden recalls that he and his wife were driving on a road outside of Pasadena, Texas when they saw a giant billboard emblazoned with a menacing message: “Welcome to Pasadena, Heart of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The year was 1980. Bolden had just been selected by NASA to become an astronaut, so his family moved to the Houston area to be near the Johnson Space Center. While he and his wife had both grown up Black in the segregated south, he had spent years away from the area after joining the military and serving in the Vietnam War. So the billboard’s message — accompanied, he remembers, by the image of a hooded Klansman riding a white horse — shook him.
“We had been away from it for so long — for decades even — only to find that we now had to pass that sign just to go get our lights turned on in the house, to connect our phone, and stuff like that,” Bolden, shown on board the Space Shuttle above, told Futurism.
After a stint at the agency that included four flights to orbit and more than 680 hours on board the Space Shuttle, Bolden would go on to be appointed by President Barack Obama to become the first Black NASA administrator in 2008.
But despite that landmark appointment, NASA’s most visible employees — the astronauts who actually go to space — have remained overwhelmingly white.
To date, more than 360 people have participated in NASA’s astronaut program. Of all of them, just 15 have been Black — only about four percent of all astronauts, despite the fact that African Americans make up 14 percent of the US population.
>NASA is at the forefront of groundbreaking space exploration — but when it comes to diversity, it's falling seriously short.
https://futurism.com/nasa-black-brown-astronauts
Charles Bolden recalls that he and his wife were driving on a road outside of Pasadena, Texas when they saw a giant billboard emblazoned with a menacing message: “Welcome to Pasadena, Heart of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The year was 1980. Bolden had just been selected by NASA to become an astronaut, so his family moved to the Houston area to be near the Johnson Space Center. While he and his wife had both grown up Black in the segregated south, he had spent years away from the area after joining the military and serving in the Vietnam War. So the billboard’s message — accompanied, he remembers, by the image of a hooded Klansman riding a white horse — shook him.
“We had been away from it for so long — for decades even — only to find that we now had to pass that sign just to go get our lights turned on in the house, to connect our phone, and stuff like that,” Bolden, shown on board the Space Shuttle above, told Futurism.
After a stint at the agency that included four flights to orbit and more than 680 hours on board the Space Shuttle, Bolden would go on to be appointed by President Barack Obama to become the first Black NASA administrator in 2008.
But despite that landmark appointment, NASA’s most visible employees — the astronauts who actually go to space — have remained overwhelmingly white.
To date, more than 360 people have participated in NASA’s astronaut program. Of all of them, just 15 have been Black — only about four percent of all astronauts, despite the fact that African Americans make up 14 percent of the US population.
