Given that the start of the 2nd Trump administration, numerous in Ferreira’s circle at NASA have actually feared losing their research study financing, and even their tasks, due to modifications directed by the White House. “People are feeling a little more protective now,” Ferreira stated, “like they have to watch what they say, and around who.” The elimination of the NASA post and comparable pages sent out a clear message to Ferreira and others:

“We’re not welcome,” she stated.

“My dream was never to work at NASA. I just love space, and I wanted to be in science, so I did anything I could to do that. But once I became an intern at NASA, I realized how much I love it. I have an emotional attachment to NASA.” Ferreira’s very first NASA internship remained in 2022, at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she started satisfying individuals as enthusiastic about area and science as she was.

“If you have people like that — people who are talented, people who work so hard to be a part of it, who want to come in and work for the future of NASA — and you’re basically sending out the message, ‘this is how easy it is for us to erase you. You’re not really welcome here right now.’ Then what are you doing exactly? You’re just keeping talent out and you’re dehumanizing people at the same time.”

Ferreira explained the brand-new environment at NASA as tense. Individuals started to fear that contributions to their particular fields might be ignored on the presumption they didn’t deserve their function if a DEIA program might have played a part in them getting it.

“You don’t just trip and stumble upon these [kinds of opportunities],” she stated. “People don’t understand that DEI was created so people like me don’t get pushed out, or just kept out.”

“Some of us work so much harder for the same things,” Ferreira stated. “I cannot even take a shower without being grateful for the water, because I didn’t grow up with running water.”

NASA’s function on Ferreira just scratches the surface area of the challenges she dealt with before reaching her position at the firm. “I understand not everyone wants to hear about hardships,” Ferreira stated, though she questions whether the function of highlighting hard stories gets lost when they’re watered down for the sake of palatability. She stated she as soon as declined a book offer due to the fact that the publishers likewise tried to polish her story by avoiding a few of its most challenging parts.

Ferreira strives on softening her accent in the U.S. due to the fact that as soon as somebody hears it, “people always treat me like garbage,” she stated. She stresses, nevertheless, that such vitriol originates from both sides of her cultural divide. In the U.S., she described, individuals see an effective female with a profession in STEM, several NASA listings on her resume, and presume her course to success was simple. She states individuals from her nation see her in a comparable light, however through a various lens. They believe she’s had it simple. “You’re both wrong,” she stated.

Rose

Ferreira is from the Dominican Republic, where over a quarter of the population lives listed below the hardship lineShe explains the area where she matured as, “probably one of the poorest in the country.”

For her, education was “learning enough to count the beans,” she stated. “You need to learn how to cook, you need to learn how to clean, and you need to get a husband.”

“I refused to do any of that,” Ferreira stated.

As a kid, Ferreira stated she was called a “malcriada,” a Spanish term significance bratty, or terribly acted. “I just didn’t listen,” she stated.

“I thought the universe was just the moon and the sun. That’s it,” Ferreira described. “I didn’t know anything else.” Her analytical nature would ultimately result in her awareness that she wasn’t going to get the education she was trying to find without making a modification. In the environment where Ferreira was maturing, it was clear: “I wasn’t going to get those answers.”

Ferreira wondered about the world around her, and was annoyed when she started facing the very same endpoint for any line of questioning. Her relentless penetrating about the methods of deep space likewise caused her abuse. “The answer for everything was, ‘God created it,’ and that was never enough for me,” she stated. “I caught a lot of beatings for that.”

The physical abuse Ferreira withstood as a kid didn’t end when her line of concerns would stop. “I’ve been through, I think, pretty much every kind of abuse that you can think of,” she described. Ferreira was sexually attacked from a young age till she handled to lawfully immigrate to the U.S. around the age of 16.

She relocated to New York City, however the abuse followed her throughout borders. She ended up being unhoused. “I was married off really young, and I left my husband. That’s a big no-no in my culture and the way I was raised,” she explained. “Everyone turned their back on me, and I wound up homeless.”

For the next 3 years, Ferreira lived under a bridge on 96th Street.

Throughout this time, she stated she had no education and hardly spoke any English. Ferreira invested her days getting on and off trains to kill time, however was desperate to alter her scenario. One day, she observed an ad on a paper she was utilizing to cover herself. A home health assistant business was employing care service providers without any previous experience and provided 30 days of training. A month later on, Ferreira had a fresh set of scrubs in hand and started working shifts to conserve up for a home. Ultimately, she had the ability to make her GED and start courses at a university.

Ferreira began at Hunter College, where her scholastic consultant prevented her from pursuing a degree in science since she didn’t have a mathematics background. They “didn’t wish to set me up for failure,” she stated. Around 20 years old, however ever the “malcriada,” Ferreira was not to be prevented. “I didn’t listen to anyone. I simply registered in the classes, and the classes kicked my ass a bit.” The punches would keep coming.

In 2016, while still working her in-home health aide job, Ferreira was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Then, in 2017, she was hit by a car while walking home from work, which landed her in the hospital. “My life up till 2017 was simply working and making it through so I might go to school and get to do area things,” she said.

Ferreira left Hunter and began taking remote courses at Arizona State University (ASU) while recovering, and would eventually earn her Bachelor’s degree in astronomy and planetary sciences. Her coursework at ASU led to her first fellowships at NASA, two subsequent internships at the space agency, and, ultimately, her full-time employment. She has also since earned a Master’s degree in space systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland.

While in recovery, faced with decreased mobility and limited resources, a friend suggested Ferreira turn to social media for advice about her situation. Her Twitter posts about her circumstances turned into long threads of explanation, as descriptions of her struggles began to grow into conversations online. She quickly gained a following, and found a community.

“I opened an account as a joke. I began discussing my life a bit. To me, those battles were typical. Getting chased after by rapists on the street, sleeping under a bridge– that things was regular to me,” Ferreira said. Her openness online led to speaking engagements at various events, which quickly led to her involvement in outreach and activism for STEM education in disenfranchised communities.

She focused on helping schools find ways to make science more interesting and accessible, and providing resources for children coming from schools without science programs. Ferreira says she is motivated to do this work because of her non-traditional path to becoming a scientist: “I desire individuals to understand, ‘oh, possibly if she can do it, I can do it.'”

When Ferreira was an intern at Goddard, she worked on the team that helped release the first deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope, and had the chance to record a Spanish voice-over for one of NASA’s This Week at NASA videos. She was mentored by Thomas Zurbuchen, former associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and had the opportunity to shadow him at NASA headquarters. It was 2022, the year NASA would publish their feature about Ferreira. That same year, she was also honored as a Brooke Owens Fellow for her STEM outreach. Ferreira was hired full-time at the space agency as an analyst in the beginning of 2024.

“They had a huge concentrate on opening chances for individuals, for females, who typically would not get the opportunity,” Ferreira said of the fellowship. “For me, that indicated opening doors into aerospace.”

Ferreira became so successful in her STEM activism that she was honored at the White House in 2024 as a Young Hispanic Leader in the Space Industry. Just a few months after receiving that honor, Trump was elected President.

Agency

Ferreira stated some departments within NASA started convening within weeks of Trump’s election to assure staff members and provide comfort– however likewise to discreetly worry the value of highlighting their worth to the company.

“The state of mind began altering,” she recalled. “Even the language that was being utilized in a few of our internal e-mails.” NASA water-cooler talk quickly turned to speculation, rumors and stories of people losing their jobs.

“By contrast,” Ferreira said, “the page thing sounds little– however to me, due to the fact that of the background that I have and where I originated from, and the important things that I needed to do to get to where I am, it seemed like an actually huge punch.” Still, she doesn’t quite blame NASA for the website censorship.

“This is not truly about NASA. This is practically what this represents,” she said, pointing out that the people who scrubbed NASA’s webpages are likely just doing their jobs. “That’s challenging,” she added, “losing your task or not having a way to keep a roofing over your head.”

There are also still people at NASA who Ferreira sees as family. A mentor and colleague who she said feels like her “surrogate dad” has worked at NASA for the better part of four decades.

“When I was an intern for the very first time, I was remaining at an actually hazardous location in D.C.,” she explained. “He heard that I was handling things, and his spouse asked if it was fine for me to remain at their home,” Ferreira said. “After that, these individuals became my real household.”

Right now, Ferreira is grateful for the certainty family can bring.

“We have a really unsure 4 years turning up, and everyone’s frightened,” she said. When Ferreira learned NASA removed her article from its website, while in the hospital during her bout with pneumonia, she turned again to social media. She posted on Threads about the deletion of her page, and it went viral. The post has received over 85,000 likes and has been shared more than 11,000 times.

Post by @rose_d_luna

View on Threads

The news spread quickly. Ferreira’s colleagues at NASA began reaching out. People were outraged, or apologetic, or they wanted to know how she was handling it all. “It’s simply been continuous,” she told Space.com at the time.

Within days, as a polarized internet debated her situation in the comment section of her Threads post, Ferreira’s story on NASA’s website was suddenly restored. No one from NASA contacted Ferreira in any official capacity to inform her about what was going on, either before it was taken down or after it was put back online.

Pneumonia prevented her from returning to her job at NASA for another few weeks — and when she did, it wasn’t easy. The weight of the tense atmosphere compounded her nervousness about her viral post: “I seem like anytime I’m simply gon na get the boot.”

The boot

Ferreira was declared pneumonia-free on Feb. 21, a Friday, and given her doctor’s approval to go back to work. She returned the following Monday. On Wednesday — 20 days after she first posted about her NASA page being taken down — she was fired.

She said she immediately knew what was happening when she walked into her weekly one-on-one with her supervisor; the meeting had an unexpected attendee. An HR representative rose from a seat in the corner as Ferreira entered the office. She was told she was being let go because she wasn’t fulfilling her position’s responsibilities, “reliable instantly.”

“When I will open my mouth, she waved her hand at me, and resembled, ‘No, we’re refraining from doing that,'” Ferreira said. “I’m hearing ringing in my head.”

“They didn’t let me speak in my own conference.”

Ferreira, wrapped in thick armor forged from a life of perseverance, is rarely brought to tears in front of others. This was not going to be the exception.

She was escorted back to her desk, to the surprised looks of her coworkers, where she was told to collect her things before being led out of the building. “I personally felt like a criminal,” she said. Ferreira kept her composure until she arrived back home, where she finally dropped her armor and broke down in tears.

“These are individuals that I relied on.”