The media claimed that Jeanette Epps will be the first African-American sent to the space station

A few weeks ago, Hidden Figures, the story about African-American women who helped get Apollo astronauts to the Moon, was overtaking and holding the box office lead. This real-life story of Black history in the Space Age supplanted the science fiction space adventure Rogue One and is holding its own, which should be no surprise. But the story and its success is a surprise. Hidden Figures revealed a part of NASA history that had been left out of the story we usually tell about the Space Age. Space exploration has been about people as well as about machines, and Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson didn’t make it into the history books until recently. History books got that wrong, until now.

At the same time this film was telling this eye-opening story of Black history, the Huffington Post, Yahoo!, Economic Times, and others ran stories about the first African-American International Space Station crew member, who is scheduled to launch for an extended stint aboard the station in 2018. These and other media outlets claimed that Jeanette Epps will be the first African-American sent to the space station or to board ISS.

The media got that wrong.