Electrical and instrumentation engineer Katia Echazarita will become the first woman to be born in Mexico and one of the youngest women in space.
{“Quote”: “You are going beyond the limits that most people have gone to and this is an important step Tabitha Dobbins, Vice President of Research
Atlanta: Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Katia encouraged Icharita to give up her dreams of space travel.
“Everyone around me – family, friends, teachers – kept hearing the same thing: This isn’t for you,” Ichazarita told The Associated Press.
Icharita, 26, will prove herself wrong on Saturday when she joins a diverse international crew that will board the fifth passenger flight for Blue Origin, the space travel project of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
She and five others, including Victor Correa Hispanha, the second Brazilian to go into space, will take off from Texas aboard a New Shepard rocket for a 10-minute flight. The motorized flight must reach an altitude of about 66 miles (106 kilometers) before parachuting into the desert.
Echazarita, whose journey is sponsored by the nonprofit Space for Humanity, will be the first woman to be born in Mexico and one of the youngest women in space. Selected from over 7,000 applicants in more than 100 countries.
The trip comes as Blue Origin competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic for space tourism dollars and efforts to increase diversity in space travel, which has long been dominated by white men.
Of the more than 600 people who have traveled into space since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961, fewer than 80 have been women and less than thirty have been black, indigenous, or Latino.
In April, astronaut Container Jessica Watkins has arrived at the International Space Station, the first black woman to be assigned a long-term mission there.
Earlier this year, an official ContainerBill Nelson announced the agency’s first equity plan to “identify and further remove barriers to opportunity in disadvantaged and underrepresented communities.”
Tabitha Dobbins, vice president for research and dean of the Graduate School of Rowan University, is a member of the American Institute of Physics’ task force aimed at increasing the representation of black undergraduates in physics and astronomy. She told The Associated Press that access to space, however short the trip, is important.
“They’re going beyond the limits that most humans have gone to and that’s an important step,” Dobbins said. “It’s so important for everyone to see themselves represented. It has a huge impact.”
But Jordan Beam, a space historian at the University of Chicago, said it remains to be seen whether the business ethos of “space for all” becomes a reality.
“Real diversity and access is sustainable diversity and access,” Beam told the Associated Press. “If we want space-dwellers to travel to space to truly reflect human diversity on Earth, we need to rethink why we go and who holds the keys.”
Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Echazarita was asked to give up her dreams of space travel.
“It’s something you can’t dream of.”
Echazarreta, who is pursuing a master’s degree in electrical engineering after a period in ContainerPeople from other cultures or other parts of the world said, “They feel it’s not for them, just because of where they’re from or where they’re from.” Born, that this is not automatically something they can dream about or be their goal.
“I hear it all the time, especially in Latin America,” Echazarita said, excited for her family to see the launch, calling it an achievement for them and her.
With this flight, Mexican parents won’t be able to tell their little girls they can’t travel to space.
Instead, he said, they’ll have to answer, “You can do that too.”
