Framing figure — Mae Jemison
Mae Jemison graduated from high school at sixteen and attended Stanford on a four-year National Achievement Scholarship, took a BS in chemical engineering and a BA in African and Afro-American studies at Stanford, and earned her medical degree at Cornell University Medical College in 1981. She practised as a general practitioner in Los Angeles, then served as a Peace Corps medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. NASA selected her as an astronaut candidate in 1987. On 12 September 1992 she launched aboard Endeavour on STS-47, the Spacelab-J mission flown jointly with Japan's National Space Development Agency, working as a science mission specialist on space motion sickness, frog fertilisation and bone loss, and serving as co-investigator on the bone cell experiment.
The point is not the flight. It is that the qualifications she brought were assembled outside the pipeline the agency was accustomed to reading, and were accepted because each one was independently verifiable. Nothing about the route mattered once the credentials were on the page.
That is the whole logic of a supply chain. A prime cannot audit a company’s history and does not try. The audit reaches the certificate, the process, the first-article inspection and the corrective-action record, and stops there. Every solicitation in this issue is a request for evidence from anyone who has it, and an indifference to everyone who merely has a claim.