From Small-Town India To NASA Kennedy Space Center: What Robotics Taught Me About Belonging

Sakshi Dubey is a Technical Program Manager at Amazon, global Robotics Leader, NASA Citizen Scientist Astronaut candidate and TEDx speaker.

The suborbital space suit weighed far more than I expected on my shoulders. Standing inside a training facility at NASA Kennedy Space Center for a suborbital mock mission, one thought surfaced: Do I really belong here?

I grew up in Moradabad, a small city in northern India known for its brass handicrafts, not its aerospace engineers. Nobody handed me a map. There was no blueprint, no industry mentor who had walked this road before me. And yet, there I was, suited up and preparing to operate at the edge of space research.

Today, I build autonomous robotic systems that operate across continents, lead enterprise AI and computer vision programs at scale, and present robotics research across the U.S. and internationally in innovation hubs like Tokyo and Barcelona. As a NASA Citizen Scientist astronaut candidate, I train for suborbital missions in the gaps between engineering sprints. I also lead an initiative that has guided hundreds of young women from underserved communities into technical fields. I know precisely what it feels like to stand at the threshold of a room and wonder if you are allowed inside.

That journey taught me a fundamental lesson: Belonging in high-tech fields is something you actively engineer. Here is what building complex, uncertain robotic systems taught me about belonging, leadership and what it means to be the edge case yourself.

1. Shift From Validation To Craft

Imposter syndrome rarely announces itself loudly. It shows up quietly when you are the only woman in a meeting room, when your proposal is evaluated differently depending on who restates it or when you feel the pressure to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously.