Nichelle Nichols's legacy continues with a NASA Space Program in her honor

Before her passing in 2022, Nichelle Nichols had been an advocate and spokesperson for NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Starting in 1977, NASA hired Nichols to help promote a recruitment drive for space shuttle astronauts. Her profile as an actress and philanthropist, and her groundbreaking role as the communications officer aboard the USS Enterprise, as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the iconic 1966 series Star Trek and Star Trek movies - provided her, as a black woman, the cache to help market the benefits of NASA’s space shuttle program.

In coordination with the Nichelle Nichols Foundation, NASA will be honoring Nichols's ambassadorship of the space shuttle program by launching the Nichelle Nichols Space Camp in Alabama's US Space & Rock Center on January 17-19, 2026. The three-day program, within a Star Trek lens, will honor Nichols's legacy by focusing on modern-day concepts to facilitate astronaut training procedures, strategies, and techniques.

The Nichelle Nichols Space Camp will be dedicated to influencing and transforming young women to pursue a career in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). The upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is a fictional mirror of this real-world program to allow students to train and work together in teams, develop leadership skills, and most importantly – encourage critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are crucial for any successful simulated space exploration mission on Earth or in the Alpha Quadrant.

This science academy is open to young women ages 14-18 and has astronaut training in zero-gravy drills, spacesuit testing, and topics like Mars colonization and Star Trek-inspired first contact mission training and a Vulcan philosophy class on IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) and how that philosophy applies to the universe. Additionally, there’s even a heat shield design challenge in which the young women will build and test a heat shield capable of withstanding extreme heat temperatures.

There has been a dedicated commitment from the program coordinators of Nichols’s Space Camp to infuse the experience with Star Trek references. Voice-over actress Bonnie Gordon who voiced the ships computer of the USS Protostar from the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy will serve as the Space Camp's Cadet Coordinator and chaperone.

With programs in space, aviation, and robots with nods to the fundamental beliefs of the United Federation of Planets, the Nichelle Nichols Space Program is certainly headed in a direction that facilitates "…where no one has gone before."