In April 2025, headlines exploded with a historic moment: Blue Origin launched its first all-female spaceflight crew. The media praised the mission as a milestone for gender equality in aerospace. Celebrities applauded. Hashtags trended. Speeches were made.

But behind the spectacle, something quieter — and more troubling — was happening: the systematic erasure of the very women who made such a mission possible.

At the same time this symbolic flight took off, the Trump administration was suspending educational partnerships with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, defunding diversity and STEM outreach programs, and quietly rolling back decades of progress on gender integration within the military and space sectors. And perhaps most cynically, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began reevaluating contracts and grants involving women-led scientific research, citing “ideological bias.”

We find ourselves in a paradox: celebrating the visibility of women in space while obscuring their real contributions to it.

This article is a modest attempt to correct that trajectory — to return our attention not to media moments, but to the women whose brilliance, resolve, and quiet resistance helped carry America beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

I. Katherine Johnson: The Mathematician Who Mapped the Heavens

Katherine Johnson was not a headline. She was the equation behind the success of John Glenn’s orbital flight in 1962. A Black woman born in segregated West Virginia, she calculated trajectories, launch windows, and return paths for Mercury and Apollo missions — all by hand, all without margin for error.

Her work was not simply technical; it was existential. Lives depended on her precision, and history moved because of it.

When John Glenn prepared for his flight, he requested that “the girl” — Johnson — personally verify the computer’s calculations. In an age where women were denied titles and access, she was trusted with truth itself.

Her story, long buried, only reached the public imagination decades later — a telling reminder that progress often depends not just on breakthroughs, but on memory.

II. Mary Jackson: The Engineer Who Reshaped the Institution

Mary Jackson, the first Black female engineer at NASA, began her career in the segregated West Area Computing section of Langley Research Center. Trained as a mathematician, she had to petition a local court to take the courses necessary for promotion — because they were held in a whites-only high school.

Jackson’s contribution went beyond numbers. Later in her career, she chose to leave engineering to advocate for women and minorities within NASA, transforming the system from within.

She understood that sending humans into space was a technical achievement. Making sure everyone had a seat at the launchpad was a cultural one.

III. Sally Ride: The Astronaut Who Redefined Representation

Sally Ride broke through gravity and gender at once in 1983 when she became the first American woman in space. A physicist by training, she was not chosen for symbolism but for excellence. And yet, symbolism found her. She endured absurd media questions — about makeup kits and motherhood — while performing complex satellite deployment on the Challenger shuttle.

Later, she co-founded Sally Ride Science to encourage girls in STEM. Her legacy is not just what she proved possible in orbit, but what she inspired on Earth: generations of girls who no longer saw science as a closed door.

IV. From Legacy to Lip Service?

These women did not seek attention. They sought purpose. And their contributions were tangible: lives saved, missions launched, systems changed. Today, we risk replacing that legacy with spectacle.

The Blue Origin all-woman flight — while a striking image — served more as an Instagram-ready campaign than a substantive shift in policy. It happened even as the administration moved to reduce women’s roles in NASA decision-making bodies and dismantle Pentagon programs encouraging female leadership in defense tech and aeronautics.

Meanwhile, classroom programs that once introduced girls to the work of Johnson, Jackson, and Ride are being slashed or “reevaluated for ideological content.” Their names are being replaced by slogans. Their complexity, replaced by pageantry.

Symbolism without substance is not progress — it is public relations.

V. The Power of Remembering — and Continuing

To honor these women is not simply to tell their stories. It is to carry forward their work: to defend science from erasure, to protect access from rollback, and to insist that inclusion is not a marketing strategy but a national imperative.

Katherine Johnson didn’t need a TikTok post. She needed — and deserved — a seat at the table.

Mary Jackson didn’t need a blue jumpsuit. She needed institutional change.

Sally Ride didn’t ask to be first for the sake of it. She asked: What’s next?

That question belongs to all of us now. Will we protect the legacy of those who built the launchpads — or allow it to be hollowed out by those more interested in visibility than vision?

In space, nothing stays aloft without structure. The same is true for progress.

Let us celebrate these women not with hashtags, but with policies that reflect their values: equity, excellence, and the quiet courage to pursue truth — no matter the orbit.

Welcome to the conversation.