Dr. Sian “Leo” Proctor, a SpaceX astronaut and a member of the Inspiration4 crew that made history with the first private mission to space, posted an image of herself smiling Monday night beside a Ford Mustang Mach-E wrapped with a blue ribbon.
It is what appeared to be a moment that needed no words.
The tweet didn’t indicate whether she purchased the all-electric SUV or if it was a gift. It did include emojis of a bow and a smiley face and what appeared to be a very happy celebrity science professor.
She followed up the Mach-E post with an image of a vintage Ford Bronco and tweeted to her 62,400 followers, “This isn’t my first @Ford. I had a Bronco II during grad school and loved it!”
Proctor added, “I had some fantastic adventures in it. I love that the Bronco is back but I needed an EV for all the city driving I’m doing. I’m going back to work at my community college district and will be visiting schools doing education outreach all over the phoenix valley.”
Thousands of people “liked” the tweets, retweeted and commented, including Ford CEO Jim Farley.
Billionaire Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce who owns Time magazine, responded, “You had me at @Ford @FordMustang Mach E!”
(He has tweeted images and praise for the Mach-E GT, Ford and Farley in the past.)
Social media lit up at the idea of an astronaut who pilots a rocket owned by Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, driving a vehicle made by Musk’s competitor. After all, Musk is also CEO of all-electric carmaker Tesla.
He and Farley have exchanged words of praise as well as jabs on Twitter.
Early Tuesday, Proctor tweeted, “Tesla is a great company & I LOVE SpaceX. But there were many factors to my decision. A year ago I was divorced, broke, & living w/my brother. What a difference a year can make! I’m full of #gratitude for my 1st EV & I believe we are stronger working together toward a better (world).”
Meanwhile, a few skeptics on Twitter questioned whether Proctor was given the Mach-E by Ford as part of a promotion. A Ford spokesman told the Free Press “no.” Proctor responded publicly by tweeting, “Ha, I wish! But believe me, if Ford or Tesla or any other company wants to give me an EV, I’ll absolutely take it!!”
Proctor, 51, is the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft, and only the fourth Black woman to go to space.
On Sept. 15, Proctor was part of the first space mission run by citizen astronauts. She piloted the Crew Dragon space capsule, which splashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast on Sept. 18.
“I received a really lovely note from Mae Jemison congratulating me on the Inspiration4mission,” Proctor said in the Oct. 12 issue of Ms. magazine. “To have her, the first Black female astronaut, tell me she was proud of my accomplishment was amazing.”
Jemison, now 65, an engineer and physician, became the first Black woman to travel to space in 1992, when she served as a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. She left NASA a year later, after six years as an astronaut. Stephanie Wilson and Joan Higginbotham, also trailblazing Black engineers, later flew NASA missions.
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Proctor hoped to work for NASA but never did.
As a child, she watched her father help guide the Apollo missions in orbit from NASA’s tracking station on Guam — earning a personal thank you from Neil Armstrong, wrote National Geographic on Oct. 7.
As an adult, Sian Proctor did serve in 2013 as what’s called an analog astronaut —someone who works in a simulated space environment — for the first NASA-funded Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission, investigating food strategies for long-duration spaceflight and future missions to Mars, according to the Ms. magazine profile and other news accounts.
Proctor, a licensed pilot and geoscientist and poet, is a major in the Civil Air Patrol and serves as the aerospace education officer for its Arizona wing, according to the cap.news website operated by the Civil Air Patrol, a U.S. Air Force auxiliary group that focuses on emergency response and rescue stateside. The article noted that Proctor won her crew slot in a competition using her space art website, Dr. Proctor’s myspace2inspire.
But day-to-day for the past two decades, she has been a professor teaching geology, sustainability and planetary science at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix.
“She won her seat on the all-private Inspiration4 mission by impressing a panel of judges with her artistry, her panache and her efforts to promote what she calls JEDI space — a just, equitable, diverse and inclusive vision of space exploration for humanity,” wrote National Geographic Oct. 7.
Proctor and her crewmates helped raise more than $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, according to news reports.
Also aboard were mission commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman who founded his Shift4 Payments payment processing company at age 16; mission specialist Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed-Martin data engineer whose friend declined the raffle prize; and Hayley Arceneaux, a bone cancer survivor and a St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital physician assistant.
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Contact Phoebe Wall Howard at phoward@freepress.com or 313-618-1034.Follow her on Twitter@phoebesaid. Read more on Ford and sign up for our autos newsletter.