Space Gala: Celebrating A New Era In The Aerospace Industry

Reinvented Magazine’s 2nd Annual Space Gala Celebrates Influential Women in STEM.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES, November 14, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ — On Saturday, November 11, 2023, as the sun set on the iconic Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it got a temporary makeover.

The Rocket Garden, displaying eight rockets from NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs, was lit up in pink lights as pop music blasted. There were signs announcing the 2nd Annual Space Gala hosted by Reinvented Magazine as young women in ball gowns posed for selfies, and giggles echoed out.

The makeover showed how far we’ve come since Astronaut John Glenn stated only 61 years ago at a congressional hearing on gender discrimination, “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”

In the generations that followed, our social order evolved, and interventions were launched to address the larger STEM gap, where women were consistently underrepresented in careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

At the second annual The Space Gala, it became apparent that decades of interventions were working, and we were looking at a very different aerospace industry than the one that gave ranks to John Glenn and Neil Armstrong while denoting female scientists and mathematicians to the role of invisible figures.

Reinvented’s Space Gala was a celebration of Women in STEM for women in STEM, that proved they would never accept invisibility again. The men who attended the gala, their colleagues, and their partners seemed to have no hostility about the way the women were adapting the culture of the traditionally male-dominated industry.

The event was studded with the social media stars of the aerospace industry, women like Joan Melendez Misner (@yourfemaleengineer), who publicly documents her life working as an engineer right at the Kennedy Space Center, Orion Test Engineer Lauren-Ann Graham (@nasa-lag), & Aerospace Engineer Naia Butler-Craig (@AstroNaia_).

The social media stars mixed with their female colleagues who could be overhead discussing weeks spent researching at sea, flight patterns on zero-gravitational flights, cancer research, and their roles in building the next rockets that would soon be headed into space.

What was most shocking about the event was not that it proved once and for all that the Bechdel Test was dead, but to see how a new generation of young women raised to believe they could build the future were choosing to build it, and how quickly they were amplifying their impact.

The event’s MC was YouTube sensation Xyla Foxlin, who received the evening’s To Infinity & Beyond Award in celebration of the mechatronics engineer and serial entrepreneur amassing over 16 million views, and founding multiple businesses.

Foxlin has deep ties to Reinvented Magazine, as she was the original founder of the charitable #PrincessesWithPowerTools program that Reinvented CEO Caeley Looney now manages through the magazine.

Looney & Foxlin have worked together to help 8,000 children safely use their first power tools, and they do it in a remarkably clever way: they dress as Princesses to ensure everyone present receives the much-needed message that Brilliant Is Beautiful. Reinvented alone reached 117,000 students last year with various STEM-positive interventions and the strategic delivery of diverse STEM-positive role models.

That was the culture shift I don’t think anyone saw coming. As our government and our school systems strove for generations to get women to enter male-dominated fields, I don’t think anyone paused to wonder what the women would build once they were empowered with the skills to build.

However, the change is here and the aerospace industry is and has evolved. In fact, when Foxlin passed the microphone to fellow Science Communicator and Major Social Media Influencer Camille Elizabeth (@TheGalacticGal), she was not there speaking on behalf of her platform; she was there on behalf of her new employer VAST, who’s preparing to launch the world’s first private space station in 2025.

VAST, in its work with Camille Elizabeth, showed that they weren’t just ahead of the curve in private space travel but also in understanding the true power of these young emerging female leaders, who have simultaneously built careers on and offline.

When Camille Elizabeth took the stage, she joked with Foxlin, before swinging the microphone comedically as she explained the way artificial gravity is generated aboard the civilian space station, then she called forward female scholars from multiple countries who were receiving support and recognition from VAST.

It was like these women could not stop investing in one another’s success. The influencers spent countless hours nurturing and inspiring the next generation of women in STEM, and then the students they inspired lined up to support their causes, like Drexel Undergraduate student, Chantelle Faria, who was awarded Volunteer of the Year.

However, without a doubt, the highlight of the night was when payload engineer and popular Instagram personality Susan Martinez (@adastrasu) took the stage in her sparkling space-themed gown with perfectly paired crocs to announce The Woman of the Year, Meenakshi ‘Meena’ Das.

Das, a software engineer with Microsoft, works to build accessible front-end experiences and is the founder of the Working With Disabilities support group. Known and acclaimed for her efforts at changing the way the world views the disabled, her speech was met with perhaps the most genuine standing ovation I have ever seen.

When the night quieted, talk turned to everything from the robotic nail painting station (yes, that’s a real thing made by Preemadona) to colonizing Mars. And although I’ve never personally been eager to move to Mars, I couldn’t help but think that if these women are the ones who will be in charge, maybe humanity’s future on the red planet doesn’t look so bleak after all.

About the Author:
Emma Jean is an award-winning author with several children’s books to her credit, including the STEM-positive bestseller, “Sleeping Beauty & The Cursed Code.” She is also the founder of SHE The Magazine and the 3.0 Talent Management Agency.

Emma Jean
3.0 Talent Management Agency
[email protected]
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