On Jul. 31, 2022, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) paid respects to actor Nichelle Nichols, who died July 30, 2022, didn’t just break new ground on “Star Trek” by playing one of the first leading recurring Black female characters on U.S. television.

A decade after the show ended, she did the same for NASA, appearing in a promotional film aimed at recruiting women and people of color to apply to be astronauts, as she recounted in a 2012 visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The next astronaut class, appointed in 1978, included Guy Bluford, the first Black American in space, and Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.