Importance Score: 72 / 100 🔴
This article delves into the experiences of Rose Ferreira, a former NASA employee, highlighting the challenges she faced during a period of shifting priorities within the agency. From a difficult upbringing to achieving her dream of working in the space sector, Rose Ferreira’s journey is one of resilience and determination. However, recent events, including the removal of her story from NASA’s website and her subsequent dismissal, raise questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion at NASA and the impact of policy changes on its workforce. This is her story.
The Removal
Rose Ferreira’s journey to NASA was far from conventional. Her personal history, marked by overcoming poverty and homelessness, was previously highlighted in a feature article on NASA’s website. However, in January, the article disappeared amid policy shifts.
The removal coincided with a series of actions within NASA aimed at aligning the agency with new directives. This included the elimination of programs associated with diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives, alongside website purges.
The scrubbing of NASA’s website extended to the removal of content related to DEIA, women in leadership, indigenous peoples, and environmental justice. References to landing “the first woman, and first person of color” on the moon as part of the Artemis program were also removed. Ferreira learned that NASA’s piece about her had been removed along with the rest of the diversity-related content.
“It’s something that I anticipated was coming,” Rose Ferreira, 39, told Space.com. Still, she said, “it did feel like a slap in the face … it feels like everything that I worked for has been taken down little by little.”
Impact and Reaction
Ferreira, recovering from pneumonia in the hospital, was informed about the removal by a school teacher who had used the page in classroom STEM presentations. “As soon as I found out, I just cried. I wasn’t expecting that, to be honest,” Ferreira said. “I was really weak from being sick … it just felt like the punching just kept coming.”
The removal of the article, along with similar pages, sent a clear message.
“We’re not welcome,” she said.
“”My dream was never to work at NASA. I just love space, and I wanted to be in science, so I did anything I could to do that. But once I became an intern at NASA, I realized how much I love it. I have an emotional attachment to NASA.” Ferreira’s first NASA internship was in 2022, at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she began meeting people as passionate about space and science as she was.
Ferreira voiced concerns about the potential impact on future talent. “If you have people like that — people who are talented, people who work so hard to be a part of it, who want to come in and work for the future of NASA — and you’re basically sending out the message, ‘this is how easy it is for us to erase you. You’re not really welcome here right now.’ Then what are you doing exactly? You’re just keeping talent out and you’re dehumanizing people at the same time.”
Ferreira described the new environment at NASA as tense. People began to fear that contributions to their respective fields may be disregarded on the assumption they didn’t deserve their role if a DEIA program may have played a part in them getting it.
“You don’t just trip and stumble upon these [kinds of opportunities],” she said. “People don’t understand that DEI was created so people like me don’t get pushed out, or just kept out.”
“Some of us work so much harder for the same things,” Ferreira said. “I cannot even take a shower without being grateful for the water, because I didn’t grow up with running water.”
NASA’s feature on Ferreira only scratches the surface of the hardships she faced before reaching her position at the agency. “I understand not everyone wants to hear about hardships,” Ferreira said, though she wonders whether the purpose of highlighting difficult stories gets lost when they’re diluted for the sake of palatability. She said she once turned down a book deal because the publishers also attempted to polish her story by skipping some of its most difficult parts.
Ferreira works hard on softening her accent in the U.S. because once someone hears it, “people always treat me like garbage,” she said. She emphasizes, however, that such vitriol comes from both sides of her cultural divide. In the U.S., she explained, people see a successful woman with a career in STEM, multiple NASA listings on her resume, and assume her path to success was easy. She says people from her country see her in a similar light, but through a different lens. They think she’s had it easy as well. “You’re both wrong,” she said.
Rose’s Background
Ferreira’s experiences prior to joining NASA shaped her perspective and fueled her determination. Her early life in the Dominican Republic was marked by poverty:
- Growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods.
- Limited access to education.
- Challenging traditional expectations.
She said education for her was “learning enough to count the beans,” she said. “You need to learn how to cook, you need to learn how to clean, and you need to get a husband.”.
“I refused to do any of that,” Ferreira said.
Ferreira said she always had an inquisitive nature which eventually led to her realization that she wasn’t going to get the education she was looking for without making a change. In the environment where Ferreira was growing up, it was clear: “I wasn’t going to get those answers.”
Ferreira explained that her persistent probing about the ways of the universe caused her abuse. “The answer for everything was, ‘God created it,’ and that was never enough for me,” she said. “I caught a lot of beatings for that.”
Overcoming Adversity
The physical abuse Ferreira endured as a child didn’t end when her line of questions would stop, however. “I’ve been through, I think, pretty much every kind of abuse that you can think of,” she explained. Ferreira was sexually assaulted from a young age until she managed to legally immigrate to the U.S. around the age of 16.
She moved to New York City, but the abuse followed her across borders. Then she became unhoused. “I was married off really young, and I left my husband. That’s a big no-no in my culture and the way I was raised,” she explained. “Everybody turned their back on me, and I ended up homeless.”
For the next three years, Ferreira lived under a bridge on 96th Street.
Turning Point
Despite facing homelessness and limited English proficiency, Ferreira sought to transform her life. She became a home health aide, earned her GED, and began university courses.
Ferreira started at Hunter College, where her academic advisor discouraged her from pursuing a degree in science because she didn’t have a math background. They “didn’t want to set me up for failure,” she said. Around 20 years old, but ever the “malcriada,” Ferreira was not to be deterred. “I didn’t listen to anybody. I just enrolled in the classes, and the classes kicked my ass a little bit.” The punches would keep coming.
In 2016, while still working her in-home health aide job, Ferreira was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Then, in 2017, she was hit by a car while walking home from work, which landed her in the hospital. “My life up until 2017 was just working and surviving so I could go to school and get to do space stuff,” she said.
Her pursuit of education led her to Arizona State University (ASU), where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in astronomy and planetary sciences, paving the way for fellowships and internships at NASA and, ultimately, her full-time employment.
Activism
While in recovery, faced with decreased mobility and limited resources, a friend suggested Ferreira turn to social media for advice about her situation. Her Twitter posts about her circumstances turned into long threads of explanation, as descriptions of her struggles began to grow into conversations online. She quickly gained a following, and found a community.
“I opened an account as a joke. I started talking about my life a little bit. To me, those struggles were normal. Getting chased by rapists on the street, sleeping under a bridge — that stuff was normal to me,” Ferreira said. Her openness online led to speaking engagements at various events, which quickly led to her involvement in outreach and activism for STEM education in disenfranchised communities.
She focused on helping schools find ways to make science more interesting and accessible, and providing resources for children coming from schools without science programs. Ferreira says she is motivated to do this work because of her non-traditional path to becoming a scientist: “I want people to know, ‘oh, maybe if she can do it, I can do it.'”
When Ferreira was an intern at Goddard, she worked on the team that helped release the first deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope, and had the chance to record a Spanish voice-over for one of NASA’s This Week at NASA videos. She was mentored by Thomas Zurbuchen, former associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and had the opportunity to shadow him at NASA headquarters. It was 2022, the year NASA would publish their feature about Ferreira. That same year, she was also honored as a Brooke Owens Fellow for her STEM outreach. Ferreira was hired full-time at the space agency as an analyst in the beginning of 2024.
“They had a big focus on opening opportunities for people, for women, who normally wouldn’t get the chance,” Ferreira said of the fellowship. “For me, that meant opening doors into aerospace.”
Ferreira became so successful in her STEM activism that she was honored at the White House in 2024 as a Young Hispanic Leader in the Space Industry. Just a few months after receiving that honor, Trump was elected President.
A Changing Agency
Trump’s election prompted concerns among NASA employees, leading to meetings aimed at reassuring them while subtly emphasizing the importance of demonstrating their value to the agency.
“The mood started changing,” she recalled. “Even the language that was being used in some of our internal emails.” NASA water-cooler talk quickly turned to speculation, rumors and stories of people losing their jobs.
Despite the website censorship, Ferreira doesn’t quite blame NASA. “This is not really about NASA. This is just about what this represents,” she said, pointing out that the people who scrubbed NASA’s webpages are likely just doing their jobs. “That’s not easy,” she added, “losing your job or not having a means to keep a roof over your head.”
There are also still people at NASA who Ferreira sees as family. A mentor and colleague who she said feels like her “surrogate father” has worked at NASA for the better part of four decades.
“When I was an intern for the first time, I was staying at a really dangerous place in D.C.,” she explained. “He heard that I was dealing with stuff, and his wife asked if it was okay for me to stay at their home,” Ferreira said. “From then on, these people became my actual family.”
Right now, Ferreira is grateful for the certainty family can bring.
News of her article’s removal spread rapidly, prompting outreach from colleagues and sparking debate online. While the article was later restored, Ferreira said no direct communication came from NASA regarding the situation.
Pneumonia prevented her from returning to her job at NASA for another few weeks — and when she did, it wasn’t easy. The weight of the tense atmosphere compounded her nervousness about her viral post: “I feel like at any moment I’m just gonna get the boot.”
The Dismissal
Shortly after returning to work, Ferreira was terminated from her position.
She said she immediately knew what was happening when she walked into her weekly one-on-one with her supervisor; the meeting had an unexpected attendee. An HR representative rose from a seat in the corner as Ferreira entered the office. She was told she was being let go because she wasn’t fulfilling her position’s responsibilities, “effective immediately.”
“When I was about to open my mouth, she waved her hand at me, and was like, ‘No, we’re not doing that,'” Ferreira said. “I’m hearing ringing in my head.”
“They didn’t let me speak in my own meeting.”
Ferreira, wrapped in thick armor forged from a life of perseverance, is rarely brought to tears in front of others. This was not going to be the exception.
She was escorted back to her desk, to the surprised looks of her coworkers, where she was told to collect her things before being led out of the building. “I personally felt like a criminal,” she said. Ferreira kept her composure until she arrived back home, where she finally dropped her armor and broke down in tears.
“These are people that I trusted.”
Looking Ahead
NASA declined to comment on personnel matters. The dismissal occurred during Ferreira’s provisional employee period. Ferreira was however, not told that was the reason she was let go. And, in fact, the White House informed NASA Feb. 19 that the agency’s provisional employees would be exempt from the “impending layoff plan.”
Meanwhile, NASA continues progress toward shrinking its personnel and resources during one of the agency’s most active periods since its space shuttle program was assembling the International Space Station. A 2026 budget proposal released by the Trump administration on May 2 calls for a 24% reduction to NASA’s budget. Ferreira doesn’t see how the space agency will continue to survive with those kinds of cuts. “When you see it from the inside, you realize how little NASA actually gets, and how much they do with it,” she said.
Even NASA’s most recent administrator, former Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida), is worried about the direction the space agency is headed. “The first person that was fired at NASA two months ago was the Chief Scientist and Chief Climate Officer,” Nelson said during an event in Washington, D.C. in April. “I think we need to be concerned about that.”
For Ferreira, she’s not looking to return to space anytime soon.
“Part of me hopes that I can go back in a few years, because my plan was just to retire at NASA,” she said. In the meantime, Ferreira is refocusing her attention on her activism and outreach to underserved communities. “I got so focused, I stopped doing outreach completely when I went into NASA, and the only outreach I was doing was within the agency.
“I felt like I needed to go back to this to give me hope in humanity again.”