Amanda Nguyen says her very public trip to the edge of space was followed by a plunge she didn't see coming. The 34-year-old Vietnamese American scientist and civil rights advocate, has revealed she fell into a deep depression amid what she calls a "tsunami of harassment" after her Blue Origin flight in April, the BBC reports. Nguyen was part of the company's first all-female crew on an 11-minute flight from Texas that also carried pop star Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, and Lauren Sanchez, the media executive who married Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos in June.
The mission on a fully automated New Shepard rocket drew sharp criticism over its cost and environmental impact, and Nguyen says the backlash quickly turned personal, describing it as "an avalanche of misogyny." In an Instagram statement, she said that when King phoned to check on her in the days after landing, "I told her my depression might last for years." Nguyen wrote that she did not leave Texas for a week and at one point could not speak through her tears when a senior Blue Origin staffer called.
She said the online reaction and coverage amounted to "an onslaught no human brain has evolved to endure," and that the criticism eclipsed what the mission meant to her: years of training, her women's health experiments conducted in microgravity, and the symbolism of flying as the daughter of Vietnamese boat refugees on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Known for her work on behalf of sexual assault survivors, Nguyen has said she postponed her astronaut ambitions after being raped in college and then spent years campaigning for legal reforms. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, the Guardian reports.
Eight months after the flight, she says "the fog of grief has started to lift." She credited supporters who reached out—"You all saved me," she wrote—and noted "overwhelming good" from the mission, including new attention to her research and fresh opportunities to push her advocacy on the global stage. "When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, bombs rained down on Vietnam," she said. "This year, when my boat refugee family looked at the sky, instead of bombs they saw the first Vietnamese woman in space." (Katy Perry said the flight turned her into a "human pinata.")
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