Astronaut Amanda Nguyen says backlash from Blue Origin flight left her depressed | Blue Origin
Vietnamese-American astronaut Amanda Nguyen, who was part of the all-female Blue Origin space flight, talked about the depression she experienced after the “tsunami of harassment” she experienced after the journey in which she became the first Vietnamese woman to go to space.
Nguyen, 34, was part of the historic 11-minute flight in April, whose crew included pop star Katy Perry, broadcast journalist Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez, journalist and wife of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. The flight was heavily criticized for its environmental impact, with critics questioning its purpose and use of resources.
Nguyen, a civil rights activist for sexual assault survivors who is also a bioastronautics research scientist, said the response to the flight buried her professional achievements and dreams “under an avalanche of misogyny.”
in a long time expression When King called to check in on her days after the flight, “I told her my depression could last for years,” she said in an Instagram post on Tuesday.
He said the volume of news about the trip and the social media response was so “unprecedented” that “even a small piece of negativity became surprising.” “This amounted to billions of hostile impressions,” he said, “an attack that no human brain has evolved to withstand.”
“I didn’t leave Texas for a week, I couldn’t get out of bed. A month later a senior staff member at Blue [Origin] “When he called me, I had to hang up because I couldn’t speak through my tears,” he wrote.
In an interview with the Guardian in March, Nguyen said she put her lifelong ambition to become an astronaut on hold after another student raped her at university and continued her years-long fight for justice, which she described as “all-consuming”. In 2019, her activism for sexual assault victims led to Nguyen being nominated for the Nobel peace prize, and in 2022, she became one of Time magazine’s women of the year.
Nguyen said the attack after the spaceflight left him feeling like “collateral damage”: “My moment of justice was crippled.”
“In my moments of deep grief this year, I reached out to a familiar place, my survivor self who found the strength to fight. How terrible it was that I needed to use that skill once again,” she said.
Now, eight months after realizing his dream of going to space, Nguyen said the “fog of sadness is beginning to lift” and thanked those who supported him and offered his best wishes. “Vietnam saved me… You all saved me,” he wrote.
Nguyen, whose parents fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and came to the USA as refugees, continued: “When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, bombs rained down on Vietnam. When my family, who became refugees by boat, looked at the sky this year, instead of bombs, they saw the first Vietnamese woman in space.
“We came in boats and now we are in spaceships,” he said.
Despite the backlash, he said, “extremely good things have come out.” [the flight]Including opportunities to meet world leaders regarding media attention to women’s health research and advocacy for rape victims.
“Being able to feel the fog lift is the greatest gift of this holiday season,” Nguyen wrote. “I can tell Gayle it won’t take years.”
She concluded her post with a photo of herself as a young student at Harvard and captioned it, “For Him.”
