Leland Melvin blasted into space twice. But in a new interview with Bill Nye, the former NASA astronaut described an egregiously racist experience that could have almost certainly derailed his life.
Early on in an expansive one hour dialogue (about spaceflight, racial injustice, and science) presented by The Planetary Society, Nye asked Melvin [at 4:38] about the ongoing protests against systemic racism in the U.S. Melvin, who is black, recounted his own grim encounter with racist policing: On the night of his high school graduation, a state trooper grabbed Melvin’s girlfriend from their car. Then, the officer tried to bully her into fabricating that Melvin “was raping her because he wanted [Melvin] to go to jail.”
Melvins’ girlfriend would not lie, and he ultimately wasn’t arrested for a phony crime. Melvin’s career would later blossom. After working as an engineer at the NASA Langley Research Center, Melvin applied and eventually became a NASA astronaut. He flew two shuttle missions to the International Space Station, most recently in 2009. Yet a single racist encounter could have ended it all, before it ever started.
“I think about how you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now because I would have been in the prison system,” Melvin told Nye. “Once you get into that system it’s very hard to get out.”
