In the rarefied world of space travellers, NASA’s new astronaut
class—seven men and five women, picked from a record-breaking eighteen
thousand applicants—includes one, nicknamed “Jaws,” who played
basketball at M.I.T., is a Marine Corps major, and was decorated for
flying Cobra gunships on a hundred and fifty combat missions in
Afghanistan. The astronaut candidate is also an immigrant—an
Iranian-American, the only one with roots in the Middle East since the
first class of astronauts was selected, in 1959. Most striking, Jaws is
a woman. Her name is Jasmin Moghbeli, and she wears her black hair
pulled back, accentuating the elegant Persian nose on her long, oval
face.

Moghbeli’s family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution and stayed for
four years in Germany, where she was born, before coming to the United
States. She remembers making brownies for her second-grade class to
celebrate when she became an American citizen. She’s wanted to become an
astronaut since at least the sixth grade, when she and her classmates at
Lenox Elementary School in North Baldwin, New York, were assigned to
write book reports about someone they admired—and then deliver the
report in an appropriate costume in class. She chose Valentina
Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut who was also the first woman in space.
Moghbeli made a space suit out of white windbreakers and used a plastic
container for the helmet.

“In my memory, I thought it was a lot cooler,” she told me with a
chuckle. “Now that I’ve looked back at the pictures, it looks more like
a beekeeper’s outfit.”

In high school, Moghbeli went to the Advanced Space Academy, a camp
with simulations of space launchings, flights, and emergencies, in
Huntsville, Alabama. Students wore royal-blue flight suits,
replicas of the ones real astronauts wear. (She took hers home and wore
it on Halloween.) By then, she knew that she wanted to fly. At M.I.T.,
she studied aeronautic engineering. At a career fair, in her junior
year, a Marines recruiter guaranteed Moghbeli that she could become a
pilot. A career in military aviation, she told me, was one of the best
routes for a woman to qualify as an astronaut. She enlisted.

Moghbeli has since been deployed into war zones three times. She flew
Cobras loaded with multi-barrel cannons and deadly hellfire missiles.
In Afghanistan, she picked up the nickname Jaws, a nickname etched on
the chopper she flew. In her latest post, she has served as a test pilot on
new technology, flying in Arizona.

Moghbeli wants to go into the unknown of deep space. “The adventurous
side of me thinks it is certainly cool to go farther into the solar
system than we’ve ever been before,” she told me. Or to Mars, she added
quickly. The first flights
with humans to Mars are projected for sometime in the twenty-thirties.
“That’s only fifteen, twenty years away, so it’s not too far off,” she
said.

Moghbeli’s appointment comes at a time of unprecedented controversy over
immigration, especially immigration from any of the six
predominantly Muslim countries that have been named in President Trump’s
travel ban. Iran is one of them. Of the more than three hundred and
sixty Americans selected to be astronauts since 1959, a dozen were
immigrants, from countries like Argentina and Australia, India and
Peru—all countries with which the United States had relations. Iran does
not fall in that category.

Born into the Shiite faith, the Moghbeli family became Lutherans when
Jasmin was a child. They still celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year,
on the spring equinox, a tradition that predates Islam. And, though
she’s never been to Iran, she speaks Farsi and identifies with the land
of her ancestors.

In 2013, Moghbeli reacted vehemently to a derogatory post on social
media suggesting that Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President
Obama, had “infiltrated” the U.S. government, noting, among other
things, that Jarrett was born in Iran. I found Moghbeli’s response on
her Facebook page. “Born in Iran”—Why is that so important? Is my mind supposed to immediately associate that with something? Perhaps with being a terrorist? It does not. My parents (along with most of my extended family) were born in Iran,” she wrote. “Turns out, they are not terrorists. And when I looked up why she [Jarrett] was born in Iran, because I could tell from the picture that she was clearly not of Iranian descent, it turns out she was born there because her (American) father was running a children’s hospital.” An African-American, he worked in Shiraz, in the late nineteen-fifties, during the pro-American monarchy.

At the end of the seven-hundred-word 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.”

I asked her about the Facebook message—and her public pride in her
heritage.

“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.

“I read Mike Massimino’s book, ‘Spaceman,’ and he talks about looking
back on Earth, and you see it without any boundaries. That’s really cool,” she told me.
“When you are in the States, and you maybe didn’t
grow up with that perspective, and maybe your family has gone back
several generations here, you maybe lost sight of what it was that made
America America in the first place. Maybe I have a fresher perspective
on it because my family did come over here.” Since we spoke last week,
however, Moghbeli’s Facebook comment appears to have been removed.

Moghbeli wore her NASA uniform for the first time on June 7th, for the
announcement of NASA’s new class. As the July 4th weekend approached,
she was reflective about her adopted country. “I have family across the
world,” she told me. “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.”