"Science fiction came from wanting to create a fantasy world I could escape into, because the reality I was living felt heavy. As a child, I was a gifted athlete, but academically I was underperforming. I feel, as a society, we put a lot of pressure on children to know what they want to do before they know who they are. So stories became an escape."
"I loved Kindred by Octavia Butler-a Black female sci-fi author exploring survival and rewriting futures. And you can't forget Carl Sagan's Contact, with a woman scientist's quest to make contact with extraterrestrial life. I was really into books that let me sit down, escape, and see the images in my mind. I spent many hours ignoring reality and just living in the books."
"One of the things that stood out to me-and there's a saying I like, [about] turning science fiction into science fact-was how many ways a lot of these authors' works actually influence things in real life. I started to say, 'Okay, well, why can't I do that?' Aerospace, for me, was about reaching the impossible, doing something that was considered unattainable-because at that time in my life, I was not a student who educators thought would do well"
Aisha Bowe overcame early academic underperformance and impostor syndrome despite being a gifted athlete; a guidance counselor suggested cosmetology. She attended community college, earned a master's in space-systems engineering from the University of Michigan, and accepted a NASA job after mentor encouragement, spending over five years there. She founded three companies, including Lingo, a STEM-education platform in Arlington. She participated in an all-female Blue Origin flight, becoming one of eight Black women to go into space. Bowe attributes her trajectory to a lifelong love of science fiction, citing Kindred and Contact and the idea of turning science fiction into science fact.
Read at Washingtonian - The website that Washington lives by.
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]