Jasmin Moghbeli: Baldwin's gift to the cosmos

Honor is due. One of Baldwin's high-achieving daughters is headed into space.

Jasmin Moghbeli, 38, who grew up on Nassau County's South Shore, will serve as spacecraft commander for a flight to the International Space Station, NASA announced. Hers is a local success story — but one with several distinctive facets worth noting.

First, there’s her education. Moghbeli is a proud product of local public schools. She first dreamed of an astronaut’s life while at Lenox Elementary School in Baldwin, and later graduated from Baldwin High School, where she also excelled at basketball and lacrosse. From there her stellar performances took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a bachelor’s in engineering, and in the U.S. Marine Corps, where she was deployed overseas three times and reportedly completed 150 combat helicopter missions.

Second, hers is an immigrant’s story. Moghbeli was born in Germany to parents who fled their native Iran amid the 1979 Islamic Revolution and later settled in Baldwin. Her mother Fereshteh told Newsday that she and her husband Kamy chose to live in Baldwin for the schools, but soon learned how multicultural it was. “Both our kids saw people from everywhere, every ethnicity, every background," she said, referencing the astronaut’s brother Kaveh.

Jasmin Moghbeli's story is also about childhood dreams shaping the course of a life. When she graduated from NASA's highly selective, two-year astronaut school two years ago, the ceremony was livestreamed into the gym at Lenox Elementary. And on a video chat, she told the kids: “When I was a sixth grader and said I wanted to become an astronaut, did everyone believe that I would one day do it? … You're going to fail at some point, but you just have to keep going."

These days, inspiration can easily cross national borders — and transcend traditional rivalries. One detail of Moghbeli's story is that in the mid-1990's, with the Cold War melted away, Moghbeli wrote a book report on the first woman in space, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova.

Right now, despite the Russian government's unprovoked war on Ukraine, there is still a chance and a need for international alliances to move forward in science, technology, commerce, sports and art. Cooperation is well established. On Monday, notwithstanding the obvious strife, two cosmonauts were due to spacewalk outside the International Space Station to activate a certain robotic arm.

And a half-century after the Long Island-based Grumman Corporation's glory as maker of the Apollo lunar module, we have, in Moghbeli, a grassroots presence in the SpaceX Crew-7 mission planned for 2023 or later.

She already symbolizes the positive side of how technology, opportunity and Long Island have evolved, and the public back home will be wishing her and her colleagues nothing but luck when she exits the atmosphere.