March 25, 2022
Iranian-American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli has been selected to travel to the International Space Station as part of the Crew-7 SpaceX mission expected to be lofted next year.
Moghbeli, 38, joined the US Marine Corps in 2005 and is now a lieutenant colonel as well as a test pilot and NASA astronaut. She was just named as pilot of the spacecraft. Andreas Mogensen, a Dane, was named commander of the mission. It will be the second space flight for Mogensen and the first for Moghbeli.
The mission is expected to launch no earlier than 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Moghbeli, Mogensen and two yet-to-be-named mission specialists will join an expedition crew aboard the space station.
Moghbeli became a NASA astronaut in 2019, one of a class of 13 chosen in 2017 from among more than 18,000 applicants. She is a member of NASA’s Artemis team and thus a potential astronaut to travel to the moon—and maybe Mars.
Moghbeli was born in Germany after her parents fled Iran. She was reared in Baldwin, New York, and holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. Her parents, Fereshteh and Kamy Moghbeli, currently live in Texas.
Jasmin Moghbeli is married to the former Sam Wald of San Antonio, Texas. They are the parents of twin girls. Wald took his wife’s name after marriage and is now Sam Moghbeli.
She served as a Marine combat pilot in Afghanistan in 2009-10 and accrued more than 150 combat missions there.
She had wanted to become an astronaut ever since at least the sixth grade, when she and her classmates were assigned to write book reports about someone they admired. She chose Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut who was the first woman in space.
In Afghanistan, Moghbeli picked up the nickname “Jaws,” a moniker etched on the chopper she flew.
Born into the Shiite faith, the Moghbeli family became Lutherans when Jasmin was a child. And, though she’s never been to Iran, she speaks Farsi and identifies with the land of her ancestors. Her husband has worked to speak Farsi.
In 2013, Moghbeli reacted vehemently to a derogatory post on social media suggesting that Valerie Jarrett, an African-American senior adviser to President Obama, had “infiltrated” the US government, noting, among other things, that Jarrett was born in Iran. (Her father was helping run a hospital in Shiraz.)
At the end of her post, Moghbeli said that Jarrett’s place of birth should not be the way to judge her. “She might be a very smart, patriotic, and accomplished lady,” Moghbeli reproached the writer of the original post. “Just remember, when I’m successful from all my hard work, that I was born in Germany (that’s where Nazis come from) and my parents are both from Iran (that’s where terrorists come from). Please don’t mention that I’m a United States Marine, it may make me sound patriotic.”
She later told The New Yorker in an interview, “That’s part of what’s so great about America, right? You have all these people, from different backgrounds, and we share some of the same values as Americans generally, but then there is so much tradition and culture behind each one of our different backgrounds,” she said.
“That just helps me remember how grateful we should be to live in this country. Yeah, it’s got flaws, just like any other country. And there are things we can improve on, that we should absolutely work on improving. But, at the end of the day, we have amazing opportunities here. And the fact that I can be a female, Iranian, in the Marine Corps, and now becoming an astronaut—it’s incredible.”