A person wearing a headset works at a computer console in a NASA mission control room, with station signs for Perseverance and Voyager ACE visible

The Afghan refugee who wants to go to space

Florence Pouya is studying aerospace engineering at MIT, and is currently on a summer internship with NASA. As an adolescent, Pouya was a member of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team (the “Afghan Dreamers”), which became famous worldwide when they participated in the first “Robot Olympics” in Washington, DC, in 2017, and then when an MTV documentary and a feature film were made about them. Amy Bracken has her story.

The World's Global Classroom

August 21, 2026Updated: August 21, 2026

ABAmy Bracken

6:55

Florence Pouya, an Afghan refugee, is studying aerospace engineering at MIT and is currently completing a summer internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.

Courtesy of Florence Pouya

When US forces withdrew from Afghanistan, among the thousands trying to get out through the Kabul airport was a 15-year-old girl named Florence Pouya.

Afghan evacuees, including women in headscarves and young children, wait behind glass at a processing facility — Evacuees from Afghanistan wait with other evacuees to fly to the United States or another safe location in a makeshift departure gate inside a hanger at the United States Air Base in Ramstein, Germany, Sept. 1, 2021. More than a year after the Taliban takeover that saw thousands of Afghans rushing to Kabul’s international airport amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, Afghans at risk who failed to get on evacuation flights say they are still struggling to find safe and legal ways out of the country. Markus Schreiber/AP/File

Today, five years later, Pouya is a rising sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.

Pouya had grown up with eight siblings in the western city of Herat. She was first turned on to tech when she was 12 years old and heard about the Afghan Girls’ Robotics Team.

“When I first saw the news about the seven girls in the national team who would travel around the world, participate in the competitions [and] raise the flag of our country, I was so amazed,” she said. “I always would admire their work, talent and bravery, because in Afghanistan, it was such a big thing to do. Being the first girls to do something in engineering and STEM is just something very huge.”

Afghan girls robotics team members wearing hijabs and blue uniforms, holding Afghan flags and applauding at the FIRST Global Challenge competition — Team Afghanistan participates in the opening ceremony for the FIRST Global Challenge in Washington, Sunday, July 16, 2017. The six-girl robotics team from Afghanistan is attending the international competition in Washington, after clearing visa obstacles that prompted intervention from President Donald Trump. The three-day high school competition is the first annual robotics competition designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science. Cliff Owen/AP/File

Pouya wanted to be part of it, so when spots on the team opened up, she was one of the several hundred adolescents who applied.

“They selected seven members for the national team, and I’m really happy that I was one of them,” she said. “I think my life began after that.”

For a year, she was trained in robotics, and at age 13, she took her first international trip to a competition in Dubai. It was an exciting life, and public figures described the team as representing Afghanistan’s future.

Until the Taliban came back.

Immediately, the robotics team was in the crosshairs of the extremist group.

After the team and staff tried and failed twice to enter the Kabul airport, their co-founder, Roya Mahboob, made headway with foreign officials, and they were flown to Qatar.

For almost two years, the Qatari government hosted the girls as they took classes and continued the robotics team’s activities, now with Pouya as captain. Until, one by one, each member left for a US college on a Qatari scholarship.

Eventually, Pouya was accepted to MIT, where she’s been able to pursue a new passion.

“When I was introduced to the idea of being an astronaut or working in space or building rockets,” she said, “that was like when you find your thing, and there’s not an ounce of doubt in your body, you’re so sure about it. That was my feeling toward being an astronaut.”

It’s hard to believe how much has changed for Pouya and her country in just five years.

Today, she talks regularly to friends in Afghanistan, even though it’s difficult to hear girls and women describe what it feels like to be confined to the house, unable to go to school or work or even the beauty salon.

Afghan women and girls in full face coverings sit at classroom desks with open textbooks, as a bearded male teacher stands at the back of the room — FILE – Afghan girls attend a religious school, which remained open since the last year’s Taliban takeover, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 11, 2022. Two years after the Taliban banned girls from school beyond sixth grade, Afghanistan is the only country in the world with restrictions on female education. Now, the rights of Afghan women and children are on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembl, Sept. 18, 2023, in New York.

It’s a situation few of her peers in the United States understand.

Person wearing an MSA half-face respirator with pink filters and safety goggles pushed up on their head, in a lab or workshop setting — Pouya working on a rocket motor in an MIT lab.Courtesy of Florence Pouya

“ It just makes me sad sometimes that there are so many people around the world, or in the US, some of my friends, who don’t even know where Afghanistan is,” she said. “They don’t even know there is a country on this planet where girls are not allowed to go to school. There’s no school open in the whole entire country for girls after sixth grade.”

Pouya wants to do what she can to help her loved ones and her country, but she knows it’s best not to agonize over what she can’t change.

“I think the best I could do now is focusing on my school and my career and doing internships, gaining more experience, being a good leader,” she said.

Last summer, she interned in San Diego at the defense technology company General Atomics.

This summer’s internship is at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Her good friend Shawn VanDiver, founder of AfghanEVAC, dropped her off at her dorm at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The two met in Qatar when VanDiver was introduced to the Afghan robotics team, and they reconnected in the US a few years later. He’s now one of the most outspoken advocates for Afghan refugees in the US.

Florence Pouya is studying aerospace engineering at MIT. In this photo, she stands beside a rocket motor after a “static fire” test she did with the MIT rocket team.Courtesy of Florence Pouya

“We’re excited to be heading to Caltech, which is insane,” he said. “It makes me so proud, in that I get to be a casual observer of this young woman who has faced extraordinary odds and is just doing it.”

Weeks after the drop-off at her dorm, Pouya said how cool it was to be part of the team building a helicopter for Mars.

“There are so many things that you would have to consider when you build a Mars helicopter,” she said, “because, you know, the gravity on Mars is very different than on Earth.”

Pouya has never let go of a founding goal of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team: to prove to the world what an Afghan girl can do.

She has many more years of study and competitive hurdles ahead, but while the Taliban forces women to stay home, she’s on track to blast out of Earth’s atmosphere.