She gave up the astronaut dream for ten years to write survivors into law. Then she went and got the dream back — at the edge of space.
Most people who find a broken system file a complaint. Amanda Nguyen filed legislation. When she learned, as a Harvard senior, that the rape kit holding her own evidence could be destroyed in six months — and that no one could tell her how to stop it — she did not accept the rule. She rewrote it.
Today she runs Rise, the civil rights nonprofit she founded in November 2014, from Washington, D.C. Its premise is almost absurdly direct: ordinary people can pen their own rights into existence. Nguyen has spent a decade proving the premise correct, one statute at a time, across state houses and the floor of Congress and, eventually, a chamber at the United Nations.
And then, in the spring of 2025, she strapped into a rocket. The activist had always, quietly, been a scientist — an exoplanet researcher, a NASA intern, a Harvard astrophysics student who set the whole thing down to go fight for survivors. The flight was the dream she had deferred. She got it back.
In 2013, in her final semester at Harvard, Nguyen was raped. Navigating the aftermath, she discovered a maze: a 15-year statute of limitations to press charges in Massachusetts, but a rape kit scheduled for destruction in six months unless she filed an extension that no official could explain how to file. The system, she has said, was its own kind of injury.
So she wrote the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act — alongside Senator Jeanne Shaheen — guaranteeing survivors the right to have their forensic evidence preserved, free medical exams, and notification before a kit is destroyed. Introduced in February 2016, it cleared the Senate in May and the House in September, both times unanimously. President Obama signed it into law that October.
That was the beginning, not the end. Through Rise and its accelerator, Rise Justice Labs, Nguyen has helped pass dozens of survivor-rights laws across the United States. In 2019 she brought the fight to the United Nations with the first Survivor Town Hall; in 2022 the UN passed a resolution recognizing access to justice for survivors of sexual violence worldwide.
The Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act passes both chambers without a single no vote, and is signed into federal law.
Rise teaches a curriculum it calls Hope-a-nomics — the idea that hope is a practice and a strategy, not a feeling.
A global recognition of survivors' right to access justice, built from a movement that started with one woman's rape kit.
We help people pen their own rights into existence.— The mission of Rise
Her parents were Vietnamese boat people who navigated by the stars to escape after the war. On April 14, 2025, their daughter crossed above them — the first woman of Vietnamese heritage in space, on the first all-female spaceflight crew since 1963.
She did not go up empty-handed, and she did not go up as a passenger. Always the scientist, Nguyen turned the suborbital arc into a lab.
To me, that moment was my full circle healing journey, one that I hope any survivor, or just anyone who's ever had a dream deferred, can know that you will heal, you will make it through, and your miracle is just around the corner.
For a decade, I gave up my astronaut dreams in order to fight for the rights of gender-based violence survivors.
She studied exoplanets and interned at NASA before activism redirected the whole flight plan.
Shepard Fairey made a portrait of her for the Amplifier "We the Future" campaign, distributed to 20,000 U.S. schools.
Her 2025 memoir, Saving Five, debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list.
She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30, Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, and BBC 100 Women.
In late 2025 she became the first Vietnamese woman to front a solo Vogue Singapore cover.