Anna Fisher, the first mother in space: ‘People said I was terrible for leaving my child behind’

***The Telegraph reports:***

“I am so grateful there was no social media back in 1984 when I first went into space!” says Dr Anna Fisher. “In 2015, that photograph of me in my space helmet was on the ‘cover’ of Reddit, with the headline, ‘The First Mother in Space’, and underneath it were *hundreds* of comments with people speaking about this like it had just happened.”

Talking via video link from her living room in Houston, Texas, the 76-year-old astronaut lifts her palms in slow-motion astonishment – as though she’s still in zero gravity. “Some people were saying how great it was that a mom could do that. But others were saying how terrible I was. You know? ‘What kind of mother leaves her 14-month-old child behind to do that?’” She exhales.

“It just blew my mind. I was thinking: ‘Don’t these people realise this all happened 30 years ago? [A lot of other mothers have gone into space since then](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/cruises/articles/how-did-the-first-mother-in-space-become-a-cruise-ship-godmother/)!’” She laughs and shudders to think how she would have felt back then, if she’d been able to read Joe Public’s judgments on her professional abilities, her parenting and her appearance (most of the comments on the post now are calling her “the first MILF in space” along with offers to “decompress her airlock, if you know what I mean”).

“I got a glimpse of what people might have said in 1984,” she says. “So I’m eternally grateful to Nasa because they really shielded us from most of that.”

Although not all of it. In the first episode of the BBC’s revealing four-part documentary *Once Upon a Time in Space* (directed by James Bluemel, who won a Bafta and an Emmy award for 2020’s *Once Upon a Time in Iraq*), we see old footage of the then-35-year-old Fisher reading aloud from an old magazine article that praises the former emergency physician as “a good astronaut, a good doctor and a good citizen”, before asking “But is she a good mother?” She believes that back then, only around one third of the public supported her.

**Read more:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2025/10/17/anna-fisher-the-first-mother-in-space-interview/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2025/10/17/anna-fisher-the-first-mother-in-space-interview/)

>1984

So maybe she was absent a week from a year old child? I guess people need to pearl clutch about something.

Geeze, why is it that men aren’t chastised for leaving their families behind? This is misogynistic behavior. The crazy thing about it is how widely accepted this is.

Oh sh**, at first glance I thought that was Ellen Ripley!

It’s projection. If life has taught me anything; it’s that anything people say about you is a projection of their expected self and freedom from flaws, that they hone in on others to prey on with.

I don’t care what she says. I’d never leave my child in space.

She was up there for a week. It’s not like she abandoned the child.