First Published:
8:54 AM PDT, August 2, 2022
Tributes continue to pour in for Nichelle Nichols, the groundbreaking actress who died from natural causes over the weekend at the age of 89.
Known for her role as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in “Star Trek” and its film sequels, Nichols got her start as a nightclub singer, and on one special day, the trailblazer serenaded Inside Edition.
In 2015, just three months after she recovered from a minor stroke at the age of 82, Nichols invited Inside Edition to spend an afternoon discussing her hopes and dreams and where her ambitions had taken her thus far.
“Even from a little girl I wanted to go to the moon, you know. I wanted to go to the stars,” she said.
As one of the first Black women on prime time TV in the 1960s, Nichols broke the glass ceiling playing Uhura on the hit sci-fi show. She also made history with television’s first interracial kiss with William Shatner.
She later went on to work with NASA recruiting women and people of color.
Not long after spending the day with Inside Edition, she would go on to travel to the edge of space in real life as a passenger on NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA. The flight soared as high as the stratosphere, 50,000 feet above Earth.
“You always wanted to go to the moon and then suddenly someone says, ‘no I’m not kidding the plane leaves,’” she laughed.
“To think that all my dreams were not dreams, they were reality they just (hadn’t) transpired yet,” she said.
