News &Politics Aisha Bowe on How a Childhood Love of Science Fiction Inspired Her School was a challenge early on, but she became a NASA engineer–and then one of the few Black women to go into space. Written by Damare Baker | Published on November 7, 2025 Share Share Bowe after her space flight this year. As a child, she told herself, “I’m going to commit to being unrealistic.” Photograph by Felix Kunze/Newscom. When NASA offered Aisha Bowe a job as an aerospace engineer, she said no. Though it was her dream, she didn’t feel she belonged there. As a kid, Bowe struggled with academics and impostor syndrome—a guidance counselor suggested she become a cosmetologist. But she went to community college and eventually got a master’s in space-systems engineering at the University of Michigan. A mentor convinced her to accept NASA’s offer, and she spent more than five years there before founding three companies, including Lingo , a STEM-education platform in Arlington. This spring, Bowe was part of the all-female Blue Origin space flight , making her one of only eight Black women to have gone into space. Yet, as she reflects here, none of that would have been possible if not for her love of science fiction. “Science fiction came from wanting to create a fantasy world I could escape into, because the reality I was living felt heavy. As a child, I was a gifted athlete, but academically I was underperforming. I feel, as a society, we put a lot of pressure on children to know what they want to do before they know who they are. So stories became an escape. “I loved Kindred by Octavia Butler—a Black female sci-fi author exploring survival and rewriting futures. And you can’t forget Carl Sagan’s Contact, with a woman scientist’s quest to make contact with extraterrestrial life. I was really into books that let me sit down, escape, and see the images in my mind. I spent many hours ignoring reality and just living in the books. “One of the things that stood out to me—and there’s a saying I like, [about] turning science fiction into science fact—was how many ways a lot of these authors’ works actually influence things in real life. I started to say, ‘Okay, well, why can’t I do that?’ “Aerospace, for me, was about reaching the impossible, doing something that was considered unattainable—because at that time in my life, I was not a student who educators thought would do well in that field. So I said, ‘I’m going to commit to being unrealistic. I’m going to commit to this fantasy world I create for myself, where I’m successful, where I’m smart, where I do something that sounds so outrageous that I’m forever going to be proud to say it.’ So I chose to pursue fantasy over reality, and the fantasy became my reality. “One of the things I love from sci-fi is that the unrealistic happens. I went to space on a rocket built by a company that did not exist for many years when I worked at NASA, and now I get to be part of this idea of turning science fiction into science fact. “At the time that we flew, only 100 women had flown in the history of human space flight. Less than ten of them were African American. And as we know, every data point counts.” Related Source: https://washingtonian.com/2025/11/07/aisha-bowe-on-how-a-childhood-love-of-science-fiction-inspired-her/