Jessica Watkins
Credit: NASA

American astronaut and geologist Jessica Watkins is making history this month. She is the first Black woman selected for an extended mission in space. Watkins and three other astronauts launched aboard a new SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft named Freedom atop a Falcon 9 rocket on April 27, 2022. Once the crew arrives, they will work and live aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is a large, inhabited Earth satellite that more than 15 nations are operating in space. Watkins is set to work aboard the station for six months. On the ISS, she will work at the microgravity laboratory and serve as the team’s mission specialist.

Jessica Andrea Watkins was born in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on May 14, 1988. Her family later moved to Lafayette, Colorado. She enrolled at Stanford University in California, in 2006.  Watkins led Stanford’s rugby team to win the 2008 national championship. Watkins was a member of the United States Women’s Eagles Sevens Rugby team, competing in the 2009 Women’s Sevens Rugby World Cup in Dubai. Watkins earned her bachelor’s degree in geological and environmental sciences from Stanford University in 2010.

Watkins studied and worked extremely hard to reach her new career in space. Watkins earned a doctorate degree in geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2015. Watkins conducted post-doctoral research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). At UCLA, she studied landslides on Mars. At Caltech, she helped plan missions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Curiosity rover.

As an undergraduate, Watkins participated in an internship for NASA at the Ames Research Center outside of San Jose, California. She compared simulated Martian soils with data gathered by the Phoenix Mars Lander.  In 2009, Watkins served as the chief geologist for a simulated mission at the Mars Desert Research Station outside of Hanksville, Utah. As a graduate student, she interned for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In 2017, Watkins was selected for astronaut training. In 2019, Watkins participated as an aquanaut in a simulated space mission at the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) Aquarius habitat, on the ocean floor off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. NASA has also selected Watkins as a crew member for the Artemis mission to the moon’s surface.

Ketanji Brown Jackson
Credit: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

Today, on April 7, 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Jackson became an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in 2022. President Joe Biden appointed Jackson to fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer.

Ketanji Onyika Brown was born on Sept. 14, 1970, in Washington, D.C. Brown’s family later relocated to Miami, Florida. Brown studied at Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in government in 1992. She worked as a reporter and researcher for Time magazine from 1992 to 1993. Brown attended Harvard Law School, where she worked as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She graduated from law school in 1996. The same year, she married the American surgeon Patrick Jackson.

From 1996 to 1998, Jackson served as a law clerk in the United States District Court of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. In 1999, she served as a law clerk to Justice Breyer. Jackson worked as an associate at several law firms and as a federal assistant public defender. In 2010, Jackson served as the vice chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, having been nominated to that position by President Barack Obama. On the commission, Jackson worked to decrease federal sentencing for certain charges. In 2012, Obama nominated Jackson to serve as a judge for the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, a position she held from 2013 to 2021. In 2021, Biden nominated Jackson to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit.