NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts
NASA has deleted two comic books about women astronauts from all its websites, NASA Watch reports, in what appears to be the latest victim of the Trump's administration's purge of "DEI" content from federal agencies.
The online comics, titled "First Woman: NASA's Promise for Humanity," and "First Woman: Expanding Our Universe," tell the stories of young women training to become astronauts, in anticipation of NASA's upcoming Artemis missions, which had been set to see the first female astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface. Oh, except that promise has been dropped, too.
The two volumes have been featured on NASA's website since being issued in 2021 and 2023, respectively. But as of March 2025, both have now been conspicuously wiped from the space agency's online presence.
https://twitter.com/NASA_Technology/status/1714728593526317323
Shortly after Trump took office in January, NASA leadership issued a directive ordering employees to scrub a whole host of terms that the administration would deem "woke," including any content "specifically targeting" women.
The space agency's acting administrator Janet Petro, who was hand-picked by Trump, also threatened employees with "adverse consequences" if they didn't speak up about any DEI efforts happening without official approval.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the sweepingly discriminatory policy is censoring content with messages as wholesome and harmless as "women can be astronauts, too." Even more grimly, NASA pages about the Artemis mission no longer boast the promise that it "will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon."
This dragnet censorship approach is being used in other wings of government, producing blunders that expose the racist and misogynistic underpinnings of its raison d'etre. Last week, for example, the Pentagon sparked an uproar when it deleted a webpage about the baseball player and civil rights hero Jackie Robinson — a supposed error officials blamed on an AI tool.
A little known comic like "First Woman" won't have quite as many rallying to its aid. But it has found itself at least one notable champion: the Iceland Space Agency. Daniel Leeb, the Executive Mission Director at the Iceland Space Agency, responded to the NASA Watch on LinkedIn, lambasting the censorship and vowing to platform the comics.
"The Iceland Space Agency will host and post First Woman issue one and two on our website come Monday morning," Leeb wrote, per NASA Watch. "We will also start an initiative to have this translated into Icelandic... and to continue the story."
"I hope for my daughters and all the daughters on Earth, that we can all begin to use our voices to push back and say clearly Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is not the boogyman some would have you believe," Leeb added. "In fact it is a foundational strength in geopolitics, economics, and in society as a whole."
More on NASA: Trump's Anti-DEI Agenda Could Put Astronauts in Real Danger
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