Jeanette Epps (left) and her replacement Aunon-Chancellor (photos by NASA)
NASA removes black astronaut from space mission
The female on track to become the first African-American crew member on the International Space Station this year, was pulled from her mission by the space agency, Mercury News reported.
Published: January 20, 2018, 10:13 am
NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps was part of the crew to launch as part of Expedition 56/67 in June 2018. But instead of looking forward to her first flight to orbit, Epps will be assigned to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Epps was one of the 14 astronaut candidates that NASA selected out of 3 500 applicants in 2009 to join the mission. after spending seven years at the CIA as a technical intelligence officer. Her time with the CIA included deployments to Iraq.
NASA gave no reasons for pulling Epps from the mission. “A number of factors are considered when making flight assignments; these decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn’t provide information,” Brandi Dean, a spokesperson for NASA, told The Verge in an email.
Epps would have been the first to become a long-term crew member, living and working on the ISS for months at a time.
She would have flown aboard a Russian Soyuz flight in June due to launch to the ISS orbiting outpost from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
The German European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut Alexander Gerst and the flight’s commander, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Prokopev would have been on the same flight.
In an interview with Elle magazine in 2017, Epps said: “I get very excited when I think about being up in space, partly because I compare it to going into a war zone. Both are very dangerous but, for me, it’s a no-brainer: I would rather face the dangers in space than go back to a war zone.”
Her replacement is Serena Auñón-Chancellor, a medical doctor from Fort Collins, Colorado. Aunon-Chancellor has spent more than nine months in Russia supporting medical operations for space station crew members.
The space agency said in a statement that Epps could still be assigned to future missions, but gave no details.
In a statement, they NASA said Epps would “return to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to assume duties in the Astronaut Office”.
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