By Ebony Flake, for Essence
“Standing apart isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it’s a signal that you are unique and doing something extraordinary,” Aisha Bowe shared.
| Image Credit: Essence |
Feeling less certain about her direction than she perceived her peers to be, Aisha enrolled at the local Washtenaw Community College. There, she met a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and aspirations. As they collectively chartered the course of self-discovery, she realized that many of the beliefs she held about herself were not her own but shaped by others’ opinions, expectations, and resentful projections of their unfulfilled aspirations. “I had to stop and go: There’s a reason why you don’t feel confident. There’s a reason why you don’t feel beautiful. There’s a reason why you don’t feel strong. Are those reasons yours? Or where they imposed upon you?” The answers would become clear in time.
Today, Aisha Bowe is a two-time startup founder, including the elite engineering firm STEMBoard, twice acknowledged as one of America’s fastest-growing. She’s also a Blue Origin astronaut, a business thought leader, and a former NASA aerospace engineer. It’s been an exciting journey for that spunky teen unclear about her path. “I still, to this day, can’t understand why society expects you to know what you want to be before you even begin to understand who you are,” she told ESSENCE.
Bowe is scheduled to go to space in 2024 as the first Black woman on the New Shepard rocket, part of Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight company Blue Origin. Read about Aisha’s astronaut selection at
Information about Black in Astro’s #BlackSpaceWeek can be found at