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Amanda Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American astronaut who was part of the all-female Blue Origin spaceflight, has opened up about her depression after she experienced a “tsunami of harassment” after the trip, in which she became the first Vietnamese woman to go to space.
Nguyen, 34, was part of April’s historic 11-minute flight, whose crew included pop star Katy Perry, broadcast journalist Gayle King, and journalist and wife of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez. The flight was heavily criticized for its environmental impact and critics questioned its purpose and use of resources.
For Nguyen, who is a civil rights activist for sexual assault survivors as well as a bioastronautics research scientist, she said the backlash to flight saw her professional achievements and dreams “buried under an avalanche of misogyny”.
In a lengthy statement shared on Instagram on Tuesday, she said that when King called to check on her days after the flight, “I told her my depression might last for years.”
She said the volume of news coverage and social media reaction to the trip was so “unprecedented” that even a “small fraction of negativity becomes staggering”. “It amounted to billions of hostile impressions,” she said, “an onslaught no human brain has evolved to endure”.
“I did not leave Texas for a week, unable to get out of bed. A month later, when a senior staff at Blue [Origin] called me, I had to hang up on him because I could not speak through my tears,” she wrote.
In an interview with the Guardian in March, Nguyen said she had put her lifelong ambition of becoming an astronaut on hold after another student raped her at university and she pursued a years-long fight for justice, which she described as “all-consuming”. In 2019, her activism for sexual assault survivors led to Nguyen being nominated for the Nobel peace prize and in 2022, she was one of Time magazine’s women of the year.
The onslaught after the spaceflight made her feel like “collateral damage”, Nguyen said: “my moment of justice mutilated.”
“In my moments of deep grief this year, I reached back out to a familiar place, to her – my survivor self – who found the strength to fight. How horrible that I needed to deploy that skill once again,” she said.
Now, eight months on from realising her dream of going to space, Nguyen said the “fog of grief has started to lift”, and thanked those who have supported her and sent her well wishes. “Vietnam saved me … You all saved me,” she wrote.
Nguyen, whose parents arrived in the US as refugees after fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, went on: “When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, bombs rained down on Vietnam. This year, when my boat refugee family looked at the sky, instead of bombs they saw the first Vietnamese woman in space.
“We came on boats, and now we’re on spaceships,” she said.
Despite the backlash, she said there had been “overwhelming good that has come out of [the flight],” including the media attention brought to her women’s health research and opportunities to meet world leaders in relation to her advocacy for rape survivors.
“It is the greatest gift this holiday season that I can feel the fog lifting,” Nguyen wrote. “I can tell Gayle it’s not going to take years.”
She ended her post with a photo of herself as a young student at Harvard, captioned: “For her.”
