Former US Secretary of State and ex-presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has on several occasions recounted a story about her writing a letter to NASA during her childhood, in which she outlined her dreams of becoming an astronaut, only to be told in response that the space agency had no women astronauts. However, prominent fact-checking website Snopes categorises the story as "unproven."
"So when I was about 13, I wrote to NASA and asked what I needed to do to try to be an astronaut. And of course, there weren’t any women astronauts, and NASA wrote me back and said there would not be any women astronauts," Hillary said in a speech in 2012. "And I was just crestfallen. But then I realised I couldn’t see very well, and I wasn’t all that athletic, so probably I wouldn’t be the first woman astronaut anyway."
As the website points out, this story was actually investigated back in 2015 by The Washington Post, which contacted NASA regarding the matter.
While neither could reportedly "reproduce the correspondence that Clinton described," NASA suggested that "such an interaction likely did take place" and that the response described by Clinton "was consistent with their policy at the time."
However, Snopes still labeled the claim in question "unproven," arguing that "there is no way to verify the actual correspondence" between Hillary and NASA after so many years have passed, even though "there is plenty of circumstantial evidence" suggesting that the US space agency likely did send Clinton the kind of response she's so often described.
