NASA just selected astronaut Jeanette Epps for a historic space mission by Boeing — 2 years after the agency abruptly bumped her from a first flight

• NASA said Tuesday that astronaut Jeanette Epps will launch aboard Boeing's new CST-100 Starliner spaceship in 2021.
• NASA previously selected Epps for a 2018 flight, but the agency abruptly removed her from that mission just months ahead of its launch.
• Had she made the flight, Epps would have been the first Black person to live and work aboard the International Space Station for months at a time.
• Epps is one of 16 active female astronauts who may one day land on the moon with NASA's Artemis program.

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps may finally be traveling to space.

The agency said Tuesday that it has assigned the 49-year-old rookie astronaut to Boeing's Starliner-1 mission, slated to launch sometime in 2021.

The mission is actually the second that NASA picked Epps to fly. But she never made the first one, a Russian Soyuz flight that lifted off in June 2018, because the agency abruptly bumped her from the crew about five months ahead of launch.

"I don't know where the decision came from and how it was made, in detail, or at what level," Epps said during a conference in 2018 conference, but noted it was not medically related. "There were Russians, several of them, who defended me in the sense that it's not safe to really remove someone from a crew that has trained together for years."

NASA told Business Insider in a statement that a "number of factors are considered when making flight assignments," adding that "decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn't provide information."

Despite the disappointing turn of events, Epps kept her composure over the years.

"Sometimes things don't go the way that you planned," she told "Business Insider Today" in 2019. "But I'm still in the astronaut corps."

With her fresh assignment, Epps is once again poised to make history. The mission is to scheduled to be the first operational flight of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which should follow an uncrewed launch (possibly later this year) and a crewed flight test in 2021.

Epps will live and work aboard the space station for half a year

NASA selected Epps, an aerospace engineer, to be an astronaut in 2009. Prior to that, she worked at Ford Motor Company as a research scientist before moving on to the Central Intelligence Agency, where she was as a technical intelligence officer for more than seven years, according to her biography.

The Starliner-1 mission's destination is the International Space Station, a facility that orbits 250 miles above Earth, and which people have inhabited continuously for 20 years. During her new upcoming mission, Epps will live and work aboard the $150 billion, football field-size laboratory for about six months.

Epps has not yet flown to space. She will join fellow spaceflight rookie Josh Cassada and veteran Sunita Williams. Williams, the Starliner-1 mission's commander, has worked with Boeing and SpaceX over the past six years on the design and functionality of their new spaceships through NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

"I can't wait for her to join our crew," Williams said in a video she tweeted on Tuesday.

Cassada tweeted a humorous video congratulating Epps, who grew up in Michigan, on her crew assignment.

"Just a couple of things I think we need to get sorted out. I know we both claim Michigan, I'm not going to arm-wrestle you for it — I've seen you in the gym. So maybe we can split it?" Cassada said. "The only other thing we need to get sorted out is, on the Starliner, I call shotgun."

Starliner launched and landed on its first uncrewed mission, called Orbital Flight Test, in December 2019. However, the spacecraft experienced two "high visibility close calls" that might have resulted in the loss of the spacecraft, NASA said earlier this year.

Boeing is now fixing its software, systems, and procedures to rectify the problems, and — at a cost of $410 million to the company — plans to refly the mission later this year. Assuming there are no further issues, veteran astronaut Mike Fincke, retired astronaut Chris Ferguson, and rookie astronaut Nicole Mann will fly the first experimental crewed flight in 2021.

NASA appears unfazed by a small air leak aboard the ISS, which a three-person crew is currently helping root out and repair.

Had NASA allowed Epps to fly on the 2018 Soyuz mission, she would have been the first Black astronaut to live and work aboard the ISS for an extended amount of time. However, that honor will likely go to Victor Glover, who's slated to fly NASA's next commercial mission with people, called Crew-1. (SpaceX successfully launched and returned its first astronaut crew on an experimental flight earlier this year.)

Similar to Starliner-1, the Crew-1 mission will be SpaceX's first operational flight of its commercial spaceship, called Crew Dragon. That mission is slated to fly to the space station as soon as October 23, and Glover will launch with fellow astronauts Shannon Walker and Mike Hopkins, as well as JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.

The Starliner-1 mission could prove especially important to Epps' career, in that she is one of 16 active female astronauts in NASA's corps who may return humans to the moon. Jim Bridenstine, the agency's administrator, has repeatedly said NASA's Artemis program will fly the first woman and the next man to the lunar surface in 2024.

"Business Insider Today" asked Epps about that possibility during a 2019 interview.

"It's mind-blowing to think about being the first [woman] to step on this object that you see in the night sky," she said. "I would hope that my mission would inspire the next generation of women, of all engineers and all scientists to kind of propel us forward, even beyond Mars."

Correction (9:00 p.m. ET): NASA astronaut Victor Glover is poised to be the first Black person to live and work aboard the International Space Station for an extended time, not Jeanette Epps, as a previous version of this story stated. We regret the error.

This story has been updated with new information.