Jeanette Epps, a NASA astronaut, took an uncommon route to space: she had to wait an additional six years to take off.

On the SpaceX Crew-8 mission for NASA, Epps will eventually take off for the International Space Station (ISS) no early than Saturday night, March 2. This will be her second long-duration trip as a Black woman on the orbiting complex. However, Epps’ scheduled arrival date of June 2018 was postponed twice due to reassignments from Boeing’s Starliner and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

“I was confident that I would fly, even though it has been a number of years,” 53-year-old Epps stated during a livestreamed Crew-8 press conference that took place on January 25 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

She kept herself happy, according to Epps, by concentrating on her training, which has kept her “pretty busy over the last few years.” She claimed that in the end, NASA transferred her to the SpaceX rocket so she could gain flying experience sooner and get ready for upcoming missions.

NASA chose Epps as an astronaut candidate in July 2009. Epps is a former technical intelligence officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an engineer by background. Only Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Epps, among international astronauts, have not yet flown in that selection group; Hansen, however, has been allocated to go on NASA’s Artemis 2 moon mission in 2025.

However, because of its 2.3% contribution to the station, the CSA only launches astronauts to the ISS roughly every six years. Along with Russia, the other main contributor to the ISS, NASA receives frequent seats and flight possibilities as a majority co-partner. Thus, in 2017, Epps was assigned to Expeditions 56 and 57, with a scheduled liftoff in June 2018 aboard a Soyuz MS-09. Considering the number of spacecraft seats available at the time, this was a typical wait for a NASA astronaut.

However, NASA declared in January 2018 that Epps will be taken off of Soyuz MS-09. Serena Auñón-Chancellor, her NASA backup, would take Epps’s position. Several variables were taken into consideration, NASA spokesperson Brandi Dean told partner collectSPACE when questioned at the time about the agency’s decision to convert to a late hour. “These decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn’t provide information,” Dean stated.

In an interview conducted live on stage during the Tech Open Air festival in Berlin in June 2018, Epps discussed the problem for the first time.

Epps went on to say that, considering they had been preparing for around two years before the reassignment, many of her Russian coworkers voiced safety concerns about her being pulled from the Soyuz crew only months before launch. “I don’t know where the decision came from and how it was made, in detail or at what level,” Epps said.

In August 2020, NASA reassigned Epps to Starliner for the spacecraft’s first-ever operational flight to the International Space Station (ISS). But due to a number of technical problems, Starliner has been delayed, and its crewed debut—a test flight to the International Space Station—is not scheduled to occur until April of this year. In August 2023, NASA allocated Epps to SpaceX Crew-8, the company’s eighth operational astronaut trip to the International Space Station.

NASA records from February 2023 show that when Epps reaches space, she will be at least the 19th Black astronaut to have done so. That is a subset of the more than 600 people who have made spaceflights globally. (The number of persons in space may vary according on the criteria used, though. For instance, in August 2023, Virgin Galactic sent two Black people into suborbital space, which is located slightly below the Kármán line—the limit of space as defined by international authorities.)

Former NASA administrator and Black astronaut Charlie Bolden has openly discussed the systemic racism in the United States that prevented Black astronauts from entering orbit until decades after their White counterparts. The Black NASA technicians on the ground who were instrumental in the first human spaceflights were also largely overlooked; these individuals are known as the “Hidden Figures.”

Robert H. Lawrence was the first Black astronaut assigned to a space mission, according to NASA; however, Lawrence passed away in an aviation accident in 1967 before the United States military’s planned Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) space station could launch. In the end, MOL never took off. Ed Dwight, a Black test pilot from the United States, took part in military space programs in the 1960s, but he was never able to reach space due to a variety of complicated issues (discussed in a 2020 Smithsonian Magazine article).