Missed Opportunity At NASA: First Woman, Person Of Color

Keith’s note: The politicos at White House and NASA were complaining about DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) in space exploration the other day. They seem to have missed the fact that it was the Trump 1.0 team who aded “first woman” to the NASA Artemis tagline. Oh well. You may recall that I mentioned an outrageous example in March 2025 of DEI-infused censorship at NASA: You Can Still Read NASA’s Deleted “First Woman” Graphic Novels. Two illustrated novels with “First Woman” in their titles featured two young girls, who happened to be brown skinned, yearning to become astronauts and explore the universe. Imagine what they could have become in future volumes of these stories with some of the new AI tools everyone now has access to. More below – including some animated AI examples.

These illustrated books – comic books – interactive graphic novels – were rather ground breaking for NASA. Not only was the topic shaped to an actual audience in a format they were comfortable with but the quality was world class. They also had an Augmented Reality feature that you could utilize when reading the books on a phone or tablet to really bring the stories to life.

Flash forward less than a year and various online AI tools let you immerse yourself in data and create imagery with a few prompts that can be of stunning accuracy – and even beauty. They are ubiquitous and often full of useless junk but also some treasures. Like any tool – it is how you use them.

I used some new features in Grok yesterday to animate the covers and a few pages of these NASA First Woman publications. The results were almost instant. Imagine what these books could have led to in future series. Possible even NASA-sponsored “fan fiction” and follow-ons created with the help of various education -oriented non-profit organizations – in a variety of languages around the world.

These products were produced by the U.S. government and are in the public domain. Maybe someone will pick up the themes of the first two volumes and further explore the adventures of these two promising astronaut candidates – and their friends. The Iceland space agency has.

These things took only seconds to generate and utilize the stored knowledge of AI to generate. If you play with them you can get even more useful results.

You can still download volume 1 (pdf) and volume 2 (pdf) from sites outside of NASA.