On September 15, 2021, at 8:02 p.m. EDT, a 51-year-old community-college geology professor from Tempe, Arizona, became the first Black woman in history to pilot a spacecraft.
Dr. Sian Proctor didn’t ride as a passenger. She sat in the left seat of Inspiration4’s Crew Dragon Resilience, took manual control, and flew the first all-civilian orbital mission higher than any human had been since the Apollo era (590 km). While billionaires grabbed headlines, Sian quietly made history twice more on the same flight: she became the first person to paint and recite poetry in orbit, and she opened the cupola window to cook the first meal ever prepared by human hands outside Earth’s atmosphere (a zero-G Mediterranean quinoa bowl).
Four years later, in 2025, Sian Proctor is no longer “jus”” an astronaut. She is the most influential Black woman in commercial space, co-founder of the world’s first space-art residency, NASA’s highest-decorated analog astronaut, and the architect of the “J.E.D.I. Space” framework (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) now written into every major American space company’s hiring policy.
This is the story of the woman who turned a childhood dream written on a napkin into the blueprint for who gets to inherit the stars.
Table of Contents
From South Central LA to the Edge of Space
Sian was born in 1970 in Guam, daughter of a Sperry engineer who worked on Apollo tracking stations. When her father died young, the family moved to South Central Los Angeles. Money was tight, but wonder was free: Sian spent nights on the roof with a $30 telescope, mapping constellations on brown paper bags.
She earned a PhD in science education, taught at South Mountain Community College for 20 years, and applied to NASA’s astronaut corps four times (2004, 2006, 2008, 2009). Each time she made it to the final 120 out of thousands, each time she was cut. In 2009 she was one of the last 47. The rejection letter crushed her.
Instead of quitting, she invented her own path. She lived in simulated Mars bases for four months at a time (HI-SEAS, 2013), cooked with freeze-dried food on a volcano in Hawaii, and became the first Black woman to reach the South Pole on a NASA-funded expedition. She kept showing up until the universe finally said yes.
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Inspiration4: The Mission That Changed Everything
In 2021, billionaire Jared Isaacman decided to buy an entire SpaceX mission and give the four seats away to “ordinary” people. One seat was raffled, one given to a childhood cancer survivor, one to a data engineer, and one labeled “Prosperity.”
Sian won the Prosperity seat by creating the first-ever space-themed NFT art collection and a business plan for off-world entrepreneurship. She raised $13 million for St. Jude in weeks.
On orbit, while the others floated in awe, Sian got to work:
- Painted five original watercolors using gravity-defying techniques
- Recited her poem “Orbiting Dreams” live on global broadcast
- Conducted geology experiments comparing lunar and Martian regolith simulants in microgravity
- Became the first person to open Dragon’s cupola and cook a full meal (she still refuses to reveal the secret zero-G spice mix)
When they splashed down after three days, Sian stepped out of the capsule, looked at the cameras, and said one sentence that broke the internet:
“The sky is not the limit. It’s just the view.”
What Sian Proctor Is Building in 2025
She never went back to ordinary life.
- Co-founded the Space2 Art Residency with the Christie’s auction house: artists now live at Starbase, Texas, creating work that sells for millions and funds STEM scholarships for girls of color
- Serves on the National Space Council Users Advisory Group, the only civilian astronaut in the room when policy is made
- Launched the Proctor Foundation for Art & Science, which has sent 42 Black and Indigenous girls to space camp since 2022
- Teaches the first-ever accredited university course on “Afrofuturism in Space Exploration” at Arizona State
- Is mission commander for the upcoming DearMoon circunlunar flight (2026–2027), where she will become the first woman of color to leave low Earth orbit
In October 2025 she keynoted the International Astronautical Congress wearing a spacesuit embroidered with kente cloth and delivered the line of the year:
“Exploration has always belonged to the brave. It’s time we admitted the brave have never been only white men.”
The Cost of Being First
Being the “first Black woman to…” comes with invisible taxes.
Death threats after Inspiration4. Trolls who said she only flew because of “DEI quotas.” A near-fatal training accident in 2023 when a centrifuge malfunction tore her rotator cuff (she finished the simulation anyway).
She still flies commercial airplanes (she’s a licensed pilot), still paints every single day, still answers every DM from little Black girls who send crayon drawings of themselves in spacesuits.
She keeps her father’s old Apollo badge in her pocket on every flight.
The Legacy Already Written in Vacuum
In 2025, little girls in Nairobi, Port-au-Prince, and Phoenix go to bed under glow-in-the-dark stars labeled “Dr. Sian’s Route.” SpaceX’s next-generation spacesuit has an optional kente-pattern inner lining because Sian insisted “culture travels too.”
When Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic publish their manifest diversity numbers, they quietly compare them to the “Proctor Standard” (the 40 % women and 35 % people of color she forced Inspiration4 to achieve).
And every time a Black woman steps onto a launch pad from now on, mission control will play the same song Sian chose for her own wake-up call on day three of Inspiration4: Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”
Because a new dawn is coming.
And Sian Proctor is piloting it.
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