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“People see me now, and they just assume, ‘oh, she had it easy,'” she says, however Rose Ferreira has had it the rest however simple. The trajectory of her existence has been so turbulent, actually, that NASA, her earlier employer, printed a function article about her choice on its site. That tale chronicles her adventure from a poverty-stricken adolescence within the Caribbean and years residing unhoused, to pursuing her training and emerging to turn out to be a NASA intern, which in the end resulted in operating on the area company full-time.
In January, that article vanished from NASA’s site. As an onslaught of government orders and directives signed via President Donald Trump despatched federal companies right into a frenzy of program cancellations and mass layoffs, NASA’s performing administrator Janet Petro started aligning the company with the White House’s new rules of the land. That incorporated getting rid of any administrative center or program related to range, fairness, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) tasks.
Note: This article mentions accounts of abuse and sexual attack.
NASA promptly started firing staff affiliated with such efforts and carried out a freeze on all pending hires. The company additionally began systematically purging its web sites of any circumstances highlighting range and inclusion. Within 3 days of Trump’s inauguration, NASA’s site for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity (ODEO), its related pages and any company web page with mentions of DEIA, ladies in management, indigenous peoples, or environmental justice began being got rid of from the web. NASA got rid of language on its Artemis program pages that referenced the company’s dedication “to land the first woman, and first person of color” on the moon as part of its Artemis 3 project — language NASA followed beneath Trump’s first management, and a objective the company had promoted over and over again. The erasure additionally incorporated a 2021 graphic novel a couple of Hispanic girl and her various astronaut group’s release to the lunar floor. On Feb. 6, Ferreira discovered NASA’s piece about her have been got rid of with the remaining.
“It’s something that I anticipated was coming,” Rose Ferreira, 39, instructed Space.com. Still, she mentioned, “it did feel like a slap in the face … it feels like everything that I worked for has been taken down little by little.”
Taken down
Ferreira was once within the clinic improving from pneumonia when she came upon NASA’s function about her have been got rid of. (It’s again now, however we will get to that.)
A college trainer contacted her to invite concerning the lacking web page, which many academics have used as a part of their study room STEM (science, generation, engineering and math) displays. “As soon as I found out, I just cried. I wasn’t expecting that, to be honest,” Ferreira mentioned. “I was really weak from being sick … it just felt like the punching just kept coming.”
Since the start of the second one Trump management, many in Ferreira’s circle at NASA have feared dropping their analysis investment, and even their jobs, because of adjustments directed via the White House. “People are feeling a little more protective now,” Ferreira mentioned, “like they have to watch what they say, and around who.” The removing of the NASA article and identical pages despatched a transparent message to Ferreira and others:
“We’re not welcome,” she mentioned.
“My dream was never to work at NASA. I just love space, and I wanted to be in science, so I did anything I could to do that. But once I became an intern at NASA, I realized how much I love it. I have an emotional attachment to NASA.” Ferreira’s first NASA internship was once in 2022, on the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the place she started assembly other folks as hooked in to area and science as she was once.
“If you have people like that — people who are talented, people who work so hard to be a part of it, who want to come in and work for the future of NASA — and you’re basically sending out the message, ‘this is how easy it is for us to erase you. You’re not really welcome here right now.’ Then what are you doing exactly? You’re just keeping talent out and you’re dehumanizing people at the same time.”
Ferreira described the brand new atmosphere at NASA as aggravating. People started to concern that contributions to their respective fields is also dismissed at the assumption they did not deserve their function if a DEIA program can have performed a component in them getting it.
“You don’t just trip and stumble upon these [kinds of opportunities],” she mentioned. “People don’t understand that DEI was created so people like me don’t get pushed out, or just kept out.”
“Some of us work so much harder for the same things,” Ferreira mentioned. “I cannot even take a shower without being grateful for the water, because I didn’t grow up with running water.”
NASA’s function on Ferreira most effective scratches the skin of the hardships she confronted earlier than achieving her place on the company. “I understand not everyone wants to hear about hardships,” Ferreira mentioned, regardless that she wonders whether or not the aim of highlighting tricky tales will get misplaced when they are diluted for the sake of palatability. She mentioned she as soon as became down a guide deal for the reason that publishers additionally tried to shine her tale via skipping a few of its maximum tricky portions.
Ferreira works arduous on softening her accessory within the U.S. as a result of as soon as any person hears it, “people always treat me like garbage,” she mentioned. She emphasizes, then again, that such vitriol comes from all sides of her cultural divide. In the U.S., she defined, other folks see a a hit girl with a profession in STEM, more than one NASA listings on her resume, and suppose her trail to luck was once simple. She says other folks from her nation see her in a identical mild, however thru a distinct lens. They suppose she’s had it simple as smartly. “You’re both wrong,” she mentioned.
Rose
Ferreira is from the Dominican Republic, the place over 1 / 4 of the inhabitants lives beneath the poverty line. She describes the group the place she grew up as, “probably one of the poorest in the country.”
For her, training was once “learning enough to count the beans,” she mentioned. “You need to learn how to cook, you need to learn how to clean, and you need to get a husband.”
“I refused to do any of that,” Ferreira mentioned.
As a kid, Ferreira mentioned she was once known as a “malcriada,” a Spanish time period that means bratty, or badly behaved. “I just didn’t listen,” she mentioned.
“I believed the universe was once simply the moon and the solar. That’s it,” Ferreira defined. “I didn’t know anything else.” Her inquisitive nature would in the end result in her realization that she wasn’t going to get the training she was once on the lookout for with out making a metamorphosis. In the surroundings the place Ferreira was once rising up, it was once transparent: “I wasn’t going to get those answers.”
Ferreira was once curious concerning the international round her, and was once annoyed when she started operating into the similar endpoint for any line of wondering. Her chronic probing concerning the techniques of the universe additionally resulted in her abuse. “The answer for everything was, ‘God created it,’ and that was never enough for me,” she mentioned. “I caught a lot of beatings for that.”
The bodily abuse Ferreira continued as a kid did not finish when her line of questions would forestall, then again. “I’ve been through, I think, pretty much every kind of abuse that you can think of,” she defined. Ferreira was once sexually assaulted from a tender age till she controlled to legally immigrate to the U.S. across the age of 16.
She moved to New York City, however the abuse adopted her throughout borders. Then she changed into unhoused. “I was married off really young, and I left my husband. That’s a big no-no in my culture and the way I was raised,” she explained. “Everybody became their again on me, and I finished up homeless.”
For the next three years, Ferreira lived under a bridge on 96th Street.
During this time, she said she had no education and barely spoke any English. Ferreira spent her days hopping on and off trains to pass the time, but was desperate to change her situation. One day, she noticed an advertisement on a newspaper she was using to cover herself. A home health aide company was hiring care providers with no prior experience and offered 30 days of training. A month later, Ferreira had a fresh pair of scrubs in hand and began working shifts to save up for an apartment. Eventually, she was able to earn her GED and begin courses at a university.
Ferreira started at Hunter College, where her academic advisor discouraged her from pursuing a degree in science because she didn’t have a math background. They “did not need to set me up for failure,” she said. Around 20 years old, but ever the “malcriada,” Ferreira was not to be deterred. “I did not pay attention to any one. I simply enrolled within the categories, and the categories kicked my ass a bit bit.” The punches would keep coming.
In 2016, while still working her in-home health aide job, Ferreira was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Then, in 2017, she was hit by a car while walking home from work, which landed her in the hospital. “My existence up till 2017 was once simply operating and surviving so I may just move to university and get to do area stuff,” she said.
Ferreira left Hunter and began taking remote courses at Arizona State University (ASU) while recovering, and would eventually earn her Bachelor’s degree in astronomy and planetary sciences. Her coursework at ASU led to her first fellowships at NASA, two subsequent internships at the space agency, and, ultimately, her full-time employment. She has also since earned a Master’s degree in space systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland.
While in recovery, faced with decreased mobility and limited resources, a friend suggested Ferreira turn to social media for advice about her situation. Her Twitter posts about her circumstances turned into long threads of explanation, as descriptions of her struggles began to grow into conversations online. She quickly gained a following, and found a community.
“I opened an account as a comic story. I began speaking about my existence a bit bit. To me, the ones struggles had been standard. Getting chased via rapists in the street, slumbering beneath a bridge — that stuff was once standard to me,” Ferreira said. Her openness online led to speaking engagements at various events, which quickly led to her involvement in outreach and activism for STEM education in disenfranchised communities.
She focused on helping schools find ways to make science more interesting and accessible, and providing resources for children coming from schools without science programs. Ferreira says she is motivated to do this work because of her non-traditional path to becoming a scientist: “I need other folks to grasp, ‘oh, perhaps if she will do it, I will be able to do it.'”
When Ferreira was once an intern at Goddard, she labored at the staff that helped free up the first deep box picture from the James Webb Space Telescope, and had the risk to report a Spanish voice-over for one in all NASA’s This Week at NASA videos. She was mentored by Thomas Zurbuchen, former associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and had the opportunity to shadow him at NASA headquarters. It was 2022, the year NASA would publish their feature about Ferreira. That same year, she was also honored as a Brooke Owens Fellow for her STEM outreach. Ferreira was hired full-time at the space agency as an analyst in the beginning of 2024.
“They had a large center of attention on opening alternatives for other folks, for ladies, who in most cases would not get the risk,” Ferreira said of the fellowship. “For me, that supposed opening doorways into aerospace.”
Ferreira changed into such a success in her STEM activism that she was once venerated on the White House in 2024 as a Young Hispanic Leader within the Space Industry. Just a couple of months after receiving that honor, Trump was once elected President.
Agency
Ferreira said some departments within NASA began holding meetings within weeks of Trump’s election to reassure employees and give them peace of mind — but also to subtly stress the importance of highlighting their value to the agency.
“The temper began converting,” she recalled. “Even the language that was once being utilized in a few of our inner emails.” NASA water-cooler talk quickly turned to speculation, rumors and stories of people losing their jobs.
“By comparability,” Ferreira said, “the web page factor sounds small — however to me, on account of the background that I’ve and the place I got here from, and the issues that I needed to do to get to the place I’m, it felt like a truly giant punch.” Still, she doesn’t quite blame NASA for the website censorship.
“This isn’t truly about NASA. This is with regards to what this represents,” she said, pointing out that the people who scrubbed NASA’s webpages are likely just doing their jobs. “That’s no longer simple,” she added, “dropping your task or no longer having a method to stay a roof over your head.”
There are also still people at NASA who Ferreira sees as family. A mentor and colleague who she said feels like her “surrogate father” has worked at NASA for the better part of four decades.
“When I used to be an intern for the primary time, I used to be staying at a truly bad position in D.C.,” she explained. “He heard that I used to be coping with stuff, and his spouse requested if it was once ok for me to stick at their house,” Ferreira said. “From then on, those other folks changed into my exact circle of relatives.”
Right now, Ferreira is grateful for the certainty family can bring.
“We have an overly unsure 4 years arising, and everyone’s scared,” she mentioned. When Ferreira discovered NASA got rid of her article from its site, whilst within the clinic throughout her bout with pneumonia, she became once more to social media. She posted on Threads concerning the deletion of her web page, and it went viral. The put up has gained over 85,000 likes and has been shared greater than 11,000 occasions.
Post by @rose_d_luna
View on Threads
The news spread quickly. Ferreira’s colleagues at NASA began reaching out. People were outraged, or apologetic, or they wanted to know how she was handling it all. “It’s simply been consistent,” she told Space.com at the time.
Within days, as a polarized internet debated her situation in the comment section of her Threads post, Ferreira’s story on NASA’s website was suddenly restored. No one from NASA contacted Ferreira in any official capacity to inform her about what was going on, either before it was taken down or after it was put back online.
Pneumonia prevented her from returning to her job at NASA for another few weeks — and when she did, it wasn’t easy. The weight of the tense atmosphere compounded her nervousness about her viral post: “I think like at any second I’m simply gonna get the boot.”
The boot
Ferreira was declared pneumonia-free on Feb. 21, a Friday, and given her doctor’s approval to go back to work. She returned the following Monday. On Wednesday — 20 days after she first posted about her NASA page being taken down — she was fired.
She said she immediately knew what was happening when she walked into her weekly one-on-one with her supervisor; the meeting had an unexpected attendee. An HR representative rose from a seat in the corner as Ferreira entered the office. She was told she was being let go because she wasn’t fulfilling her position’s responsibilities, “efficient straight away.”
“When I used to be about to open my mouth, she waved her hand at me, and was once like, ‘No, we aren’t doing that,'” Ferreira said. “I’m listening to ringing in my head.”
“They did not let me discuss in my very own assembly.”
Ferreira, wrapped in thick armor forged from a life of perseverance, is rarely brought to tears in front of others. This was not going to be the exception.
She was escorted back to her desk, to the surprised looks of her coworkers, where she was told to collect her things before being led out of the building. “I personally felt like a criminal,” she said. Ferreira kept her composure until she arrived back home, where she finally dropped her armor and broke down in tears.
“These are those who I relied on.”
Moving on
NASA said the space agency “does no longer touch upon staff issues” when we reached out for a statement on Ferreira’s dismissal. Ferreira was within her provisional employee period at NASA — a group targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spearheaded by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to downsize the federal workforce — but was not told that was the reason she was let go. And, in fact, the White House knowledgeable NASA Feb. 19 that the company’s provisional staff could be exempt from the “coming near near layoff plan.”
In the weeks since her firing, issues on the area company don’t appear to have markedly advanced. Reports of ideas made to NASA staff to purge their workspaces of LGBTQI+ symbols have emerged along claims of outright bullying over coworkers’ Pride decorations.
Ferreira heard the ones rumors, too. “I do not believe all amenities are like that,” she said. “Every facility has its personal cultural identification.”
Meanwhile, NASA continues growth towards shrinking its staff and assets throughout one of the vital company’s maximum energetic sessions since its area commute program was once assembling the International Space Station. A 2026 finances proposal launched via the Trump management on May 2 requires a 24% relief to NASA’s finances. Ferreira does not see how the distance company will proceed to live on with the ones types of cuts. “When you notice it from the interior, you understand how little NASA in truth will get, and what sort of they do with it,” she said.
Even NASA’s most recent administrator, former Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida), is worried about the direction the space agency is headed. “The first individual that was once fired at NASA two months in the past was once the Chief Scientist and Chief Climate Officer,” Nelson mentioned throughout an match in Washington, D.C. in April. “I believe we want to be interested by that.”
Petro, NASA’s Acting Administrator, has labored to persuade the boat since Nelson’s departure, however admits occasions at NASA were “bizarre” in recent times. She mentioned final month that she is extra keen than any person to peer the brand new NASA administrator be showed.
A vote to verify Trump’s select for that function — billionaire entrepreneur and personal astronaut Jared Isaacman — was once lately forwarded to the Senate via the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. If showed, Isaacman stands to inherit an area company going through the biggest lower to its investment in historical past, in keeping with the nonprofit Planetary Society.
For Ferreira, she’s no longer taking a look to go back to area anytime quickly.
“Part of me hopes that I will be able to return in a couple of years, as a result of my plan was once simply to retire at NASA,” she said. In the meantime, Ferreira is refocusing her attention on her activism and outreach to underserved communities. “I were given so targeted, I finished doing outreach totally once I went into NASA, and the one outreach I used to be doing was once throughout the company.
“I felt like I needed to go back to this to give me hope in humanity again.”
