Brian Murphy (they/them), an aspiring astronaut and winner of the 2021 Out Astronaut Contest, wearing a space suit for the first time.

NASA image of the STS-7 launch on June 18, 1983, from Kennedy Space Center, FL. Dr. Sally Ride, who later came out via her obituary, was one of the five crew members.

There have been over 600 trained astronauts and it is estimated that 7.1% of the U.S. population is LGBTQ+. Based on this data, I created a grid of 600 squares and inverted 43 of them to represent the astronauts who should statistically be a part of the LGBTQ+ community.

The top image is the cover of a 1950 Senate report that incited what was known as the Lavender Scare – which required any known LGBTQ+ federal employee be fired. In over two decades, 5,000-10,000 employees were removed from the federal government. NASA was formed in 1958 and as a United States government agency, all of its employees, including astronauts, were included under this order. The bottom is a surreal image of geothermal mud pots.

The Mercury Seven astronauts are welcomed to Texas at the Sam Houston Coliseum on July 4, 1962. Astronauts train in Texas and launch from Florida, two states that have recently passed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.

Early astronauts and their families, including Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong (second row, first from right) and Buzz Aldrin (second row, second from left).

I photographed and mirrored this image of a conference room at NASA Johnson Space Center to represent the closed-door decisions of which astronauts are assigned to which missions. The mirroring echoes the Rorschach test ink blots, one of the two heterosexuality tests that Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo NASA astronauts were required to take.

Manipulated NASA image of advanced crew escape suits, used since 1994 on Space Shuttle Missions.

The Orion capsule on the floor of the Astronaut Training Facility at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, shot from the outside looking in. This vehicle will transport future astronauts to the moon, Mars, and beyond, allowing humans to go deeper into space than ever before. Any astronaut who will fly in an Orion capsule will train in this one.

I staged an image of a queer person in an astronaut suit with a beam of light, a target, on them.

Mirrored aerial landscape.

Grid of Soyuz MS-11 landing on June 25, 2019, with a crew of three astronauts, including Anne McClain. She was outed months later when her wife filed a complaint claiming that Anne illegally accessed her financial information while on the International Space Station. The complaint outed Anne, making her the third known LGBTQ+ astronaut whose LGBTQ+ identity was revealed after their flight, after Sally Ride and Wendy Lawrence. The grid is pixelated as a nod to the secret nature of her identity.

A queer person wears an astronaut suit in a surreal landscape. Astronaut psychological selection criteria from Aeromedical Evaluation for Space Pilots (July 1963) is overlaid. This was the personality scale on which each early astronaut candidate was ranked.

I gave 100 people a Rorschach test ink blot and asked them what they saw. Early astronauts needed to see “feminine anatomy” in order to be selected. Some of these people would have passed and most would not have.

Kennedy Space Center just before the launch of SpaceX Crew-3, November 10, 2021.

Early astronaut homes in the El Lago neighborhood of Houston. Most of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts and their families lived in the few surrounding neighborhoods near NASA Johnson Space Center.

Manipulated NASA image of the Space Shuttle Challenger during mission STS-7, June 1983.

Lunar eclipse from November 19, 2021. The next phase of the American space program, Artemis, aims to not only return humans to the moon but establish a long-term presence on the surface.

Brian Murphy during flight simulations after donning an astronaut suit for the first time.

NASA image of an audience watching the film Apollo 11: First Steps Edition at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., May 2019. Former United States Vice President Mike Pence sits in the right foreground. The film has been replaced by my image of two women kissing.

A queer person, semi-erased from the world while in an astronaut suit.