IDAHO FALLS (KIFI) – The first Latina astronaut in space, Ellen Ochoa, touched down in Idaho Falls to address the Village Improvement Society Wednesday at College of Eastern Idaho (CEI).
As an 11-year-old girl, she watched the Apollo 11 lunar landing on television.
“Of course, women weren’t allowed to be astronauts at that point,” Ochoa said. “I mean, no one would have said to an 11-year-old girl, ‘Oh, is this something maybe you want to go out and do?’ I mean, not even say scientist or engineer or pilot, much less astronaut.
But Sally Ride paved the way, becoming the first U.S. woman in space in 1983.
After being rejected once by NASA, Ochoa persevered and was selected as an astronaut in 1990.
She completed four trips for NASA from 1993 through the 2000s, serving as a mission specialist and flight engineer.
“We’re called mission specialists, so we do a lot of the other jobs – operating the robotic arm, which I ended up doing on all four of my flights, doing spacewalks when that’s required, and in charge of the science experiments, which was of course particularly interesting to me,” Ochoa said. “That was kind of the motivation for me in the first place, and then you know everybody helps with operating your vehicle and making sure everything’s going correctly.”
In total, she spent almost one thousand hours in space.
But her message to all women, including those wanting to pursue a career in STEM, was much more down to Earth.
“We need you. We need bright minds. We need people who think of good questions, who help us come up with solutions,” Ochoa said. “You don’t have to look around very far to see – there’s lots of challenges that we have that we need to overcome. We want to make sure we get everybody’s ideas and put them together for that, and we absolutely need women to do that.”
Ochoa was in mission control during the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster that disintegrated over Texas, and shared lessons NASA learned from the tragedy.
“The commander of that mission, Rick Husband, was somebody I’d flown with. He had been the pilot on my third flight, so I knew him really well and his family and all of that,” she said. “… We learned a lot. It was a lot of hard lessons, and even though there were engineering reasons why this accident happened, there were also human reasons in that if we had asked different questions over the previous two or three years, we could have prevented that.”
But the agency implemented major reforms, and Ochoa took those lessons with her later into her career.
She served as Director of the Johnson Space Center from 2013 to 2018, before retiring after 30 years working for NASA.
During the presentation, Ochoa answered questions from CEI President Lori Barber, as well as several from the audience.
She even taught the audience a delicious recipe for “space s’mores.”
Ochoa is the author of a series of children’s books in Spanish and English.
The Village Improvement Society (VIS) is a civic group and women’s organization modeled after the original society founded in 1904. Ochoa’s presentation was the first in its ‘Inspire’ lecture series.
“Happy to be here in Idaho Falls. Of course, there’s lots of great STEM that goes on in this town, and I’m really happy to talk about it,” she said.
