February 07 2020
After 2-1-2 years of training, Jasmin “Jaws” Moghbeli has now graduated from the space agency’s school for astronauts and becomes the first Iranian qualified by the United States to fly into space.
She earned her fierce nickname during her time as a decorated helicopter gunship pilot who flew more than 150 missions in Afghanistan.
She is a Marine Corps major, MIT graduate and college basketball player. She is also a distinguished graduate of the US Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland—meaning she is a “Top Gun” in the Marine Corps.
She is now eligible for spaceflight assignments to the International Space Station (ISS), Artemis missions to the moon, and possible future missions to Mars.
Her graduating class included 11 NASA candidates, as well as two Canadian Space Agency candidates, all selected in 2017. The NASA candidates, including Moghbeli, were chosen from a record-setting pool of more than 18,000 applicants.
Speaking to Agence France Presse (AFP) after graduating in NASA’s 22nd astronaut cohort, the 36-year-old immigrant said she hoped her example might help inspire others from similar backgrounds.
“I would love for everyone to be able to be inspired by everyone, but it is a little easier to be inspired by someone who looks like you or has something in common with you, so I do hope there is that influence,” she said.
She and her brother were born in Germany to Iranian parents, Fereshteh and Kamy Moghbeli, architecture students who had fled Iran after the revolution.
But Moghbeli grew up on Long Island in Baldwin, New York, which she considers her hometown—and her story after that reads like an immigrant’s fairy tale.
At 15, she attended an advanced space camp, cementing her ambition to one day reach for the stars.
She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she studied aeronautical engineering. But her parents were concerned to learn she then planned to become a military pilot (a well-trodden path to the astronaut corps).
Moghbeli signed up as a Marine in 2005—just four years after the September 11 attacks, and her parents were worried about what their daughter might face as a person of Middle Eastern heritage.
“But once I joined, they gave me absolute support,” she said, crediting the backing of her family, and later her partner, Sam, whom she married three months ago, for her success.
Moghbeli said she had personally not faced problems during her time in service. “I haven’t in any way felt that changed anything about how I’m treated,” she told AFP.
She spoke fondly of close friendships forged during her military missions and astronaut training—feelings that are clearly reciprocated.
At her NASA graduation ceremony, classmate Jonny Kim, born in California to Korean parents, described Moghbeli as “dependable,” “resilient” and “fierce,” in short, “the perfect crewmate I’d go into the void of space with.”
Kim is himself a decorated Navy Seal and emergency physician. He and Moghbeli were two of the five described as “people of color” in the graduating class of 11. The others are a black, an Asian Indian and a Hispanic. The astronaut corps now numbers 48.
As an astronaut, Moghbeli will need to draw upon her experiences and the close calls she faced both as a test pilot and later as a combat pilot, to think fast and mitigate the unique risks that come with space flight.
So what is it about space that makes it all worthwhile?
“One of the reasons I love working in human space exploration is it’s something we generally all agree on and unite on,” she said, citing two decades of close US-Russian cooperation on the International Space Station, despite the two countries’ otherwise fraught ties.
“I think it is an area where we see diplomacy where we don’t see it in other areas,” she said. “I think it has an impact.”
Moghbeli has been awarded four Air Medals, two Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals, three Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals and various unit commendations. She was also awarded the US Navy Test Pilot School Class 144 Outstanding Developmental Phase II Award and the Commander Willie McCool Outstanding Student Award as the Class 144 Honor Graduate.