First Latina in orbit retires as head of JSC
First Latina to orbit Earth leaves legacy of inclusion after 30 years at NASA
Ellen Ochoa, the second woman and first Hispanic to lead NASA’s Johnson Space Center, marks the last day of her trailblazing 30-year career with the space agency.
Ellen Ochoa walked purposely across Johnson Space Center’s campus, the unusually sunny day as bright and cheerful as her coral blazer.
After 30 years at NASA, the veteran astronaut could make the walk to mission control with her eyes closed. But that day, the walk was momentous and somewhat final.
She was about to watch her last space launch as a battle-tested member of NASA as two U.S. astronauts were rocketed from Khazakstan to the International Space Station. In January, she had quietly announced to colleagues her plan to retire May 25 as leader of Johnson, the agency’s human space flight hub that employs 10,000 civil servant and contractor employees.
The day, understandably, was bittersweet.
“It’s hard to leave the mission and it’s hard to leave the people,” she said. “It’s hard, absolutely.”
Ochoa, now 60, has spent the last five years leading the Houston center — only the second woman and first Hispanic to do so. Friday marked the last day of her trailblazing career with the space agency.
The California native joined NASA in the late 1980s at the dawn of the space shuttle program, a time when space flight opened up to people of different backgrounds, ethnicities and gender. By 1993, she was the first Latina to go to space. She flew four times in her astronaut career, logging almost 1,000 hours in space.
Ochoa is in the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, has six schools named after her — in California, Oklahoma, Washington and Texas — and has become an outspoken advocate for girls entering science, engineering, technology and math (STEM) fields. She’s also a classical flautist.
Those who worked alongside her describe her as a good role model for women, someone who is smart, driven and compassionate yet who was focused on the NASA team and its goal of human exploration.
“She focuses on the people and cares about the team,” said Melanie Saunders, the center’s acting deputy director who has
worked with Ochoa for more than a decade. “She’s spent a lot of time in her tenure focusing on inclusion and innovation and how we can use employee engagement to drive the advancement of human exploration in space.”
But after three decades, Ochoa is ready to take a breather. She and her husband, Coe Miles, are moving to Boise, Idaho — a place they’ve visited often and fallen in love with.
She has been replaced by Mark Geyer, an Indiana native with NASA for about 28 years. He spent a number of those years at Johnson, including two as Ochoa’s deputy director.
Though Ochoa is ready for a change, she admits it’s a tough time in history to leave, just as the Trump administration has renewed the nation’s push for human exploration to the moon and beyond.
“It’s hard to leave the people and the mission and I think that always makes it difficult to determine when is the right time,” Ochoa said. “Obviously we’re in the middle of some important developments … but for me this is just a logical sort of transition year … It’s a good time to try new things.” Space shuttle incentive
Ochoa first considered “astronaut” a seemingly viable career path on April 12, 1981, the day the first space shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The start of the shuttle program was a “big event” for the 22-year-old budding scientist who was pursuing a graduate degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University. For the first time since President John F. Kennedy’s famous moonshot speech in 1962, women and minorities had a chance to join the exclusive astronaut corps.
“NASA was trying to get a broader mix of people across all fields because of everything they were doing,” Ochoa said. “The design and mission of shuttle pushed NASA to be more inclusive.”
Seven years later in 1988, the Shuttle program was going strong when Ochoa walked into NASA’s California-based Ames Research Center as a research engineer. Through the program, NASA had sent the first American woman, Sally Ride, into space in 1983, followed by the first African-American, Guion Bluford, later that year. Astronauts aboard had deployed and rescued numerous satellites and conducted countless scientific studies on orbit.
The space agency had also recovered from heartbreak. In 1986, all seven crew members on the Space Shuttle Challenger were killed 73 seconds after lift off. It was the first major astronaut accident since 1967, when all three Apollo 1 astronauts were killed on the launchpad after fire erupted inside the cabin.
Ask why she dreamed of being an astronaut, and she looks incredulous. “Who wouldn’t want to?”
Ochoa tried to join NASA as an astronaut three years before Ames hired her on as a research engineer in 1988. She first applied in 1985 but didn’t make the cut. She tried again in 1987 and made it to the interview round, one of just 120 people nationwide to do so. She didn’t make the cut that year, either.
Michael Coats, who would later tap Ochoa as his deputy after he became the Johnson Space Center director in 2005, remembers her interview vividly.
“She impressed all of us with her obvious smarts,” Coats said. “She was quick on the draw but she also impressed us with her poise under pressure.” Iconic photo, mission
Standing in socked feet on the aft flight deck of the Space Shuttle Discovery, Ochoa holds a flute to her lips and begins to play.
Zero gravity causes her brown hair to float wildly around her young face. Manuals and other odds and ends hang suspended in the air around her. She tucks her feet into straps on the floor to keep herself upright. The 1993 photo is from Ochoa’s first trip to space, freezing in time the moment when her two worlds collided.
Ochoa, a classical flautist, once dreamed of pursuing music in college. Back then, she never would have dreamed of playing her beloved flute thousands of miles above Earth.
Yet there she was, flute in hand, as she became the first Latina in space.
During that nine-day mission, she and her crewmates conducted studies to better understand the effect of solar activity on the Earth’s climate and environment. She also operated a robotic arm that captured and deployed a satellite studying the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere.
Over the next decade, Ochoa flew on shuttle missions three more times. By the end of her last flight in 2002, she had logged almost 1,000 hours in orbit.
“I loved the opportunity to be in space but to me it wasn’t just about being in space,” she said. “It was about being part of a team. It was about we have a goal to accomplish, about scientific discovery, about learning what humans can do in space, about bringing value to country.”
Ochoa quit flying but transitioned into several different roles on the ground. She worked in the astronaut office where staff oversee everything related to astronaut training and operations. She also worked on the mission control room floor and was director of Flight Crew Operations.
Saunders first started working with the veteran astronaut when she was director of flight crew operations, a position that made her responsible not only for all the astronauts but also flight operations out of Ellington Field. Ellington is the heart of Johnson’s flying operations where astronauts are trained for spaceflight.
Ochoa “is smart, always well prepared, calm and has a knack for getting right to the heart of the issue,” Saunders said. “She can see solutions other people eventually get to but don’t see as quickly and she can identify the core problem and begin to find approaches to resolve it.”
Coats, who retired as center director in 2012, lists the same attributes when describing why he chose Ochoa to serve as his deputy director in 2007.
“I was very, very impressed again by not only her technical skills, which are outstanding, but her management skills as well,” Coats said. “I think she’s done a terrific job over the last five years. I hate to see her leave. I’m proud of her.”
The last launch
The viewing room above mission control was standing-room-only in March when Ochoa walked in, various televisions playing live feeds of the imminent launch to the International Space Station.
As she reached the front of the room, the mission’s pin displayed prominently on her lapel, the crowd of family and friends of the two U.S. astronauts immediately quieted. This was the woman responsible for keeping their boys safe.
Ochoa told them of the importance of what their loved ones were doing — how their work on the space station would help future astronauts get to Mars and how hard Johnson personnel have worked to make sure both the astronauts and the space station were safe.
“We’re watching over the station systems and crew day-in and day-out,” Ochoa told the group.
It’s that constant compassion and attention to detail that made Ochoa one of the best center directors that Herb Baker, who retired last year from NASA, worked with in his 42 years with the agency.
“She’s very accessible and she’s very smart — no surprises there,” he said, “and she cared deeply about the people who worked out there.”
What the future holds
Ochoa took over as center director at Johnson during a time of uncertainty for the space agency. Three years prior in 2010, President Barack Obama ended NASA’s Constellation Program, a brainchild of the George W. Bush administration to send astronauts back to the moon as a stepping stone for Mars. Saying the program was too costly and inefficient, the Obama administration instead aimed to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and then near Mars by the 2030s.
Still, Ochoa made sure flights to the space station went smoothly and that astronauts were prepared for space. She oversaw all the research and development at Johnson, including work on the Orion spacecraft built to eventually take humans to Mars.
Since President Donald Trump took office, there’s been a shift back toward Bush’s initial vision of going back to the moon then Mars. Trump’s $19.9 billion proposed budget for the next fiscal year tasks NASA with launching an Orion flight with no crew by 2021, followed by a launch of Americans around the moon in 2023.
It also calls for NASA to build a $2.7 billion Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, which would act as a minispace station orbiting the moon, by 2023. Once built, crews could live and work there for 30 to 60 days at a time and it also serve as a stop-over for astronauts traveling deeper into space.
“To me, I’m really excited,” Ochoa said of the future of NASA. “There’s more of a focus on working to get to the moon than there was in the previous administration.”
Ochoa and her husband already have purchased a home in the heart of Boise, an idyllic town surrounded by foothills. She’s keeping her options open for the future.
For now, she’ll continue serving on several boards, including the National Science Board, and she’ll continue speaking out about women and minorities in STEM and leadership. But she plans to keep tabs on NASA.
“I already told them,” she said, “to make sure they invite me back for all the launches.”