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judy gradually losing her patience with interviewers over the span of her NASA career is sending me into orbit

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“If you qualify and would like to be an astronaut, now is the time. This is your NASA.”

In 1977, NASA was looking for new recruits to join the Astronaut Corps and fly the up-and-coming Space Shuttle. In this new era, NASA also sought to diversify its ranks and improve the space agency’s culture. In its first twenty years, NASA’s Astronaut Corps was almost exclusively white and entirely male. As Kim McQuaid writes in his excellent essay, “‘Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures’: Civil Rights at Nasa in the Nixon Era and Beyond,” (which is available online) NASA hired fewer racial minorities and women than any other federal institution, and their equal opportunity program was “a near total failure.”

Under pressure from both external forces and within (including Ruth Bates Harris, the first Black woman to hold a senior role in NASA management), NASA made a more concerted effort to recruit women and racial minorities for their next group of astronauts. Part of their outreach including hiring Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek. In addition to meeting with community organizations and college students, she created advertisements like this one, in which she and Apollo astronaut (and fourth man to walk on the Moon) Alan Bean discuss and demonstrate the future of space exploration.

NASA Astronaut Group 8 (nicknamed TFNG), announced in January 1978, was the largest class of astronaut candidates yet: thirty-five Americans, including the first six women, three Black men (the first since 1967, when Bob Lawrence was selected but died in a plane crash several months later), and the first Asian American.

Col. Frederick Gregory, an Air Force test pilot who was part of TFNG and later the first Black commander of a shuttle mission, spoke about the impact of Nichols’ ad spot: “[NASA] had a very positive and strong campaign to encourage women and minorities. And I saw her on the TV one day, and she pointed directly at me and she said, ‘I want you in the astronaut program.’ And she was talking to me.”

Nichols has also reflected on the results of her work with NASA:

When NASA asked me to help them find the first qualified women and minorities to join the then all-male-all-white astronaut corp[s], I did so with great enthusiasm. One of the first that my company was able to reach was a beautiful, young, brilliant woman named Sally Ride. She not only joined the astronaut corps – she revolutionized it by blazing the trail that so many female astronauts followed. She became MY inspiration to continue to search to find the next Sally Ride, or Dr. Mae Jemison... [Ride] once thanked me for my recruitment efforts while under contract to NASA, saying “If it hadn’t been for you I might not be here.”