Space station is set to get first Black woman

Astronaut Jeanette Epps will shatter a long-standing glass ceiling on her way to the International Space Station.

The 49-year-old aerospace engineer from Syracuse, N.Y., is expected to become the first Black woman to live and work aboard the station for a long-duration mission sometime next year.

She will join Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner — the first operational crewed flight of the company’s Starliner spacecraft, according to a recent NASA announcement.

“I’m looking forward to the mission,” Epps said on Twitter.

Her historic arrival would come two years after she was pulled from a similar mission.

Epps, who has a master’s degree in science and a doctorate in aerospace engineering, was slated to fly on the Russian Soyuz rocket to the space station in 2018. Without providing explanations, NASA announced Jan. 18 of that year that astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor would take her place in a June expedition.

Epps was to “return to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to assume duties in the Astronaut Office and be considered for assignment to future missions,” the agency said.

The Washington Post reported at the time that her brother, Henry Epps, suggested that the reason behind the unexpected change in crew had been fueled by racism.

“My sister Dr. Jeannette Epps has been fighting against oppressive racism and misogynist in NASA and now they are holding her back and allowing a Caucasian Astronaut to take her place!” he wrote in a since-deleted Facebook.

He also linked his post to an online petition demanding the agency “return Dr. Jeanette Epps back To ISS mission.”

More than a dozen African American astronauts have flown in space and visited the space station, but the 2018 mission would have made Epps the first Black crew member to live there.

“Jeanette is a fantastic addition to the Starliner-1 team,” NASA Administrator

Jim Bridestine wrote in a tweet.

Her crew mates, Williams and Cassada, were selected for the Starliner-1 mission in August 2018. This will be Williams’ third spaceflight and the first for Cassada. This will also be Epps’ first spaceflight.

Before becoming a member of the 2009 astronaut class, Epps worked for the CIA.

NASA turned to Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build capsules and ferry astronauts to and from the space station after the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011.

SpaceX sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley onboard its Crew Dragon capsule to the space station earlier this year, marking the first time astronauts were launched

from U.S. soil since the shuttle program was retired.

After two months onboard the station, Behnken and Hurley safely splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., this month. SpaceX and NASA are scheduled to launch its first operational crewed flight no earlier than Oct. 23 from Kennedy Space Center pad 39A.

That flight will send NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, a Houston native, as well as Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, to the station for a sixmonth science mission. Glover will likely now become the first Black astronaut to join the space station crew.

This report contains material from wire services.