Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Astronaut candidate from Miami
When Frank Rubio was a student at Miami Sunset Senior High, he loved physics. And math. And the natural sciences. But becoming an astronaut? “I wasn’t a kid who dreamed of becoming one,” Dr. Francisco “Frank” Rubio, 41, who graduated from Miami Sunset in 1994, said in an interview Thursday. “It wasn’t in my realm of possibility.”
Rubio was picked last week to be one of 12 astronaut candidates from NASA’s largest pool of 18,000 applicants, surpassing the previous record of 8,000 in 1978. He started considering an astronaut career during medical school, when a guest speaker mentioned the types of people NASA recruits — engineers, pilots and medical professionals.
“I kept it in the back of my mind for about 10 years,” said the highly ranked combat veteran, who is a family physician. “Then I decided to go ahead and try.”
The newly minted astronaut candidate graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1998, served as a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot and in 2010 earned his medical degree from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, a government-run university in Bethesda, Md. When he was selected by NASA, he was an active duty member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces at Fort Carson, near Colorado Springs, Colo.
Rubio’s family is from El Salvador, but he was born in Los Angeles and spent the first 15 years of his life there. Rubio moved to Miami with his mother and father — Myrna Argueta and a former Univision voice talent Martin Mayen — when he was 16, according to school records. His mother attended her son’s NASA introduction in Houston on Wednesday. It was in Miami that Rubio met his future wife, Miami native Deborah Rubio.
It was in Miami, too, where he was encouraged to embrace his cultural heritage.
“In Florida you have politicians, businessmen, professionals who are Hispanic,” he said. “It wasn’t looked down upon as much, and it was a thing that was very proud in Miami. I hadn’t been around that growing up.”
Rubio joins the ranks of several astronauts with Miami ties, including Coconut Grove native Winston Scott, who was recruited to NASA in 1992.
“He is in for a life-changing experience,” Scott said Friday. “He’s going to thoroughly enjoy it. I’m sure he is going to do his family and our city very proud. In the course of working hard to be a good astronaut, I would tell him to just relax. Enjoy it while it lasts, and good luck to him.”
Rubio’s Miami schooling was also crucial to his successful trajectory, he said. Rubio started 10th grade at Miami Sunset in 1991, where he studied under teachers in the science department who encouraged him to follow his interest in the sciences. While at the school, he took challenging courses like AP Chemistry, AP Biology and AP Physics, graduating with an impressive 4.174 GPA.
“We are extremely proud of Dr. Rubio and his accomplishments,’ said Daisy Gonzalez-Diego, a school spokeswoman.
After Miami Sunset, he went to West Point, where his focus on leadership and discipline “helped start the ball rolling.”