Janelle Monáe's NASA photoshoot makes the space age cool again
Actress, singer and all around badass artist Janelle Monáe is have a space moment.
Monáe -- who stars as one of the brilliant "human computers" from NASA's earliest days in the new movie Hidden Figures -- took a trip down to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a photoshoot for Cosmopolitan's February issue.
Monáe has released a handful of images from the space-inspired shoot on Instagram and Twitter.
Her photographs basically give you a tour of some of the most iconic sites at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
One image shows Monáe sticking to her signature white and black style in the center's rocket garden -- an outside area populated by some of NASA's first launchers.
Another image shows Monáe in front of a mockup of the space shuttle Atlantis' cockpit, part of the exhibit displaying the space shuttle at Kennedy.
In Hidden Figures, Monáe plays Mary Jackson, one of the unsung heroes of NASA's early days, who helped get astronaut John Glenn to orbit for the first time in 1962.
Until now, Jackson's contributions to the U.S. space program were largely unknown to the world at large.
Jackson was a trailblazer who was granted special permission to take University of Virginia classes at a segregated high school in order to earn an engineering degree.
She became NASA's first female African-American engineer in 1958.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
