Jasmin Moghbeli is an Iranian-American marine who flew combat missions in Afghanistan. Now she’s one of NASA’s newest astronauts. Photograph by Robert Markowitz / NASA

In the rarefied world of space travellers, NASA’s new astronaut class—seven men and five women, picked from a record-breaking eighteen thousand applicants—includes one, nicknamed “Jaws,” who played basketball at M.I.T., is a Marine Corps major, and was decorated for flying Cobra gunships on a hundred and fifty combat missions in Afghanistan. The astronaut candidate is also an immigrant—an Iranian-American, the only one with roots in the Middle East since the first class of astronauts was selected, in 1959. Most striking, Jaws is a woman. Her name is Jasmin Moghbeli, and she wears her black hair pulled back, accentuating the elegant Persian nose on her long, oval face.

Moghbeli’s family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution and stayed for four years in Germany, where she was born, before coming to the United States. She remembers making brownies for her second-grade class to celebrate when she became an American citizen. She’s wanted to become an astronaut since at least the sixth grade, when she and her classmates at Lenox Elementary School in North Baldwin, New York, were assigned to write book reports about someone they admired—and then deliver the report in an appropriate costume in class. She chose Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut who was also the first woman in space. Moghbeli made a space suit out of white windbreakers and used a plastic container for the helmet.

“In my memory, I thought it was a lot cooler,” she told me with a chuckle. “Now that I’ve looked back at the pictures, it looks more like a beekeeper’s outfit.”

In high school, Moghbeli went to the Advanced Space Academy, a camp with simulations of space launchings, flights, and emergencies, in Huntsville, Alabama. Students wore royal-blue flight suits, replicas of the ones real astronauts wear. (She took hers home and wore it on Halloween.) By then, she knew that she wanted to fly. At M.I.T., she studied aeronautic engineering. At a career fair, in her junior year, a Marines recruiter guaranteed Moghbeli that she could become a pilot. A career in military aviation, she told me, was one of the best routes for a woman to qualify as an astronaut. She enlisted.

Moghbeli has since been deployed into war zones three times. She flew Cobras loaded with multi-barrel cannons and deadly hellfire missiles. In Afghanistan, she picked up the nickname Jaws, a nickname etched on the chopper she flew. In her latest post, she has served as a test pilot on new technology, flying in Arizona.

Moghbeli wants to go into the unknown of deep space. “The adventurous side of me thinks it is certainly cool to go farther into the solar system than we’ve ever been before,” she told me. Or to Mars, she added quickly. The first flights with humans to Mars are projected for sometime in the twenty-thirties. “That’s only fifteen, twenty years away, so it’s not too far off,” she said.

Moghbeli’s appointment comes at a time of unprecedented controversy over immigration, especially immigration from any of the six predominantly Muslim countries that have been named in President Trump’s travel ban. Iran is one of them. Of the more than three hundred and sixty Americans selected to be astronauts since 1959, a dozen were immigrants, from countries like Argentina and Australia, India and Peru—all countries with which the United States had relations. Iran does not fall in that category.

Born into the Shiite faith, the Moghbeli family became Lutherans when Jasmin was a child. They still celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year, on the spring equinox, a tradition that predates Islam. And, though she’s never been to Iran, she speaks Farsi and identifies with the land of her ancestors.

In 2013, Moghbeli reacted vehemently to a derogatory post on social media suggesting that Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, had “infiltrated” the U.S. government, noting, among other things, that Jarrett was born in Iran. I found Moghbeli’s response on her Facebook page. “Born in Iran”—Why is that so important? Is my mind supposed to immediately associate that with something? Perhaps with being a terrorist? It does not. My parents (along with most of my extended family) were born in Iran,” she wrote. “Turns out, they are not terrorists. And when I looked up why she [Jarrett] was born in Iran, because I could tell from the picture that she was clearly not of Iranian descent, it turns out she was born there because her (American) father was running a children’s hospital.” An African-American, he worked in Shiraz, in the late nineteen-fifties, during the pro-American monarchy.

At the end of the seven-hundred-word post, Moghbeli said that Jarrett’s place of birth should not be the way to judge her. “She might be a very smart, patriotic, and accomplished lady,” Moghbeli reproached the writer of the original post. “Just remember, when I'm successful from all my hard work, that I was born in Germany (that's where Nazis come from) and my parents are both from Iran (that's where terrorists come from). Please don’t mention that I'm a United States Marine, it may make me sound patriotic.”

I asked her about the Facebook message—and her public pride in her heritage.

“That’s part of what’s so great about America, right? You have all these people, from different backgrounds, and we share some of the same values as Americans generally, but then there is so much tradition and culture behind each one of our different backgrounds,” she said.

“I read Mike Massimino’s book, ‘Spaceman,’ and he talks about looking back on Earth, and you see it without any boundaries. That’s really cool,” she told me. “When you are in the States, and you maybe didn’t grow up with that perspective, and maybe your family has gone back several generations here, you maybe lost sight of what it was that made America America in the first place. Maybe I have a fresher perspective on it because my family did come over here.” Since we spoke last week, however, Moghbeli’s Facebook comment appears to have been removed.

Moghbeli wore her NASA uniform for the first time on June 7th, for the announcement of NASA’s new class. As the July 4th weekend approached, she was reflective about her adopted country. “I have family across the world,” she told me. “That just helps me remember how grateful we should be to live in this country. Yeah, it’s got flaws, just like any other country. And there are things we can improve on, that we should absolutely work on improving. But, at the end of the day, we have amazing opportunities here. And the fact that I can be a female, Iranian, in the Marine Corps, and now becoming an astronaut—it’s incredible.”