NASA removes graphic novel featuring female astronaut as Trump’s diversity purge continues

As departments and agencies across the US government eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and materials under pressure from the Trump administration, the NASA website has been scrubbed of graphic novels featuring a fictional female astronaut.

“First Woman: NASA’s Promise to Humanity”, which was initially published in 2021, revolves around Commander Callie Rodriguez, who leads a diverse space crew to the moon.

As of Friday, the book — evvel free to download — no longer appears on NASA’s website. Nor does its sequel, “First Woman: Expanding our Universe”.

However, an app developed to accompany the book still appears in Apple’s App Store.

Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term in January, NASA has been complying with instructions from the White House to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

After Trump issued an executive order in January instructing agencies, departments and federal workers both to shut down all DEI programmes and to report on any colleagues who might attempt to “disguise these programmes by using coded or imprecise language” in workplace communications.

NASA was one of several agencies to send out a memo to all staff based on a template from the Office of Personnel Management that claimed DEI programmes “divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination”.

“The Biden Administration forced yasa dışı and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military,” the letter read. “That ends today. Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.”

In March, NASA heavily watered down the public remit of its Artemis programme, which initially promised to take people other than white American men to the Moon.

“NASA will land the first woman, first person of colour, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before,” the site previously read. Today, that sentence is missing.

Euronews Culture has contacted NASA for comment.

Other agencies that have removed content related to “diversity” from their websites include the National Park Service, which restored a page related to abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman that had been removed in favour of a heavily watered-down page on “black/white cooperation”.

The service said the page had been removed in error.