The 60-foot-tall suborbital rocket took off from Blue Origin’s services in West Texas at 9:26am ET, vaulting a gaggle of six folks to greater than 62 miles above the Earth’s floor — which is broadly deemed to make the boundary of outer space — and giving them a couple of minutes of weightlessness earlier than parachuting to touchdown.
Most of the passengers paid an undisclosed sum for his or her seats. But Katya Echazarreta, an engineer and science communicator from Guadalajara, Mexico, was chosen by a nonprofit known as
Space for Humanity to be a part of this mission from a pool of hundreds of candidates. The group’s objective is to ship “exceptional leaders” to space and permit them to expertise the overview impact, a phenomenon continuously reported by astronauts who say that viewing the Earth from space give them a profound shift in perspective.
Echazarreta instructed CNN Business that she skilled that overview impact “in my own way.”
“Looking down and seeing how everyone is down there, all of our past, all of our mistakes, all of our obstacles, everything — everything is there,” she stated. “And the only thing I could think of when I came back down was that I need people to see this. I need Latinas to see this. And I think that it just completely reinforced my mission to continue getting primarily women and people of color up to space and doing whatever it is they want to do.”
Echazarreta is the first Mexican-born woman to journey to space and the second Mexican after Rodolfo Neri Vela, a scientist who joined one in every of NASA’s
Space Shuttle missions in 1985.
She moved to the United States along with her household on the age of seven, and she or he remembers being overwhelmed in a brand new place the place she did not converse the language, and a instructor warned her she may need to be held again.
“It just really fueled me and I think ever since then, ever since the third grade, I kind of just went off and have not stopped,” Echazarreta recalled in an Instagram
interview.
When she was 17 and 18, Echazarreta stated she was additionally the primary breadwinner for her household on a McDonald’s wage.
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“I had sometimes up to four [jobs] at the same time, just to try to get through college because it was really important for me,” she stated.
These days, Echazarreta is engaged on her grasp’s diploma in engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She beforehand labored
at NASA’s famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. She additionally boasts a following of greater than 330,000 customers on TikTok, hosts a
science-focused YouTube collection and is a presenter on the weekend CBS present “Mission Unstoppable.”
Space for Humanity — which was based in 2017 by Dylan Taylor, a space investor who just lately joined a Blue Origin flight himself — selected her for her spectacular contributions. “We were looking for some like people who were leaders in their communities, who have a sphere of influence; people who are doing really great work in the world already, and people who are passionate about whatever that is,” Rachel Lyons, the nonprofit’s government director, instructed CNN Business.
Echazarreta stated she was motivated to turn into a public determine after working at JPL and never seeing different engineers who seemed like her.
“There are so many people in this world who dream about the same things that I was dreaming about. And yet I’m not seeing them here. So what’s happening?” she stated. “It was not enough for me to have made it and to be there. I needed to also help bring others with me.”
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On her Blue Origin flight Saturday, Echazarreta flew alongside Evan Dick, an investor who had already flown with Blue Origin in a December flight and have become the first to turn into a repeat flier. The different passengers included Hamish Harding, who lives within the United Arab Emirates and is the chairman of a jet brokerage firm; Jaison Robinson, the founding father of a business actual property firm; Victor Vescovo, the co-founder of a personal fairness funding agency; and Victor Correa Hespanha, a 28-year-old who secured his seat after shopping for an NFT from a gaggle known as
The Crypto Space Agency.
