Two digital comics that once lived prominently on the NASA website have now been scrubbed from it in the wake of executive orders to remove all traces of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, from government websites.
The two titles were First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity and First Woman: Expanding Our Universe, which were posted to the site in 2021 and 2023, respectively. The first features the fictional story of female astronaut Callie Rodriguez as the first woman to walk on the moon. The second showed a diverse crew of astronauts exploring the moon. The comics were written by Brad Gann and Steven List, with artwork by Brent Donoho and Kaitlin Reid.
The stories were meant to inspire “the next generation of explorers,” which NASA has dubbed the Artemis Generation, as they work on a real-life project to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon. According to NASAWatch, NASA also removed an image of two female astronauts on the International Space Station holding one of the graphic novels, and a YouTube video promoting it was made private.
“Callie is an inspirational character for underrepresented communities and, as a person of Indian descent with young children, I deeply understand the power of a diverse fanbase seeing a place for themselves within our ambitious missions. To solve the many challenges of sustainable lunar exploration, we need innovative ideas from diverse sources and non-traditional communities,” said Dr. Prasun Desai, acting associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate, in a press release when the second comic was released.
While NASA removed them from their site, both are still available online as PDFs; here are links to volume 1 and volume 2. If you visit the NASA page where they once lived, you get a 404 error page that says “The cosmic object you were looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon.”