San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Groundbreaking Latina astronaut retires
Famous photo taken of flautist on space shuttle
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; 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 contract 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 is 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 engage- ment 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She has been replaced by Mark Geyer, an Indiana native with NASA for 28 years. He spent several years at Johnson, including two as Ochoa’s deputy director.
Ochoa first considered “astronaut” a seemingly viable career path on April 12, 1981, the day the first space shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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.”
Ask why she dreamed of being an astronaut, and she looks incredulous. “Who wouldn’t want to?”
Iconic photo
Standing in socked feet on the aft flight deck of the Space Shuttle Discovery, Ochoa holds a flute to her lips and be- gins 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.”
Since President Donald Trump took office, there’s been a shift back toward President George W. Bush’s 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 PlatformGateway, 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.”
So, it’s not an ideal time to leave NASA — but there never will be,
Ochoa said.
Ochoa and her husband already have purchased a home in the heart of Boise, an idyllic town surrounded by foothills. She is 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.”