Blue Origin is already preparing its fifth flight, in which five space tourists will travel; One of them is Katya Echazarreta, a 26-year-old Mexican woman who immigrated to the United States at a very young age. This will make her the first American woman to fly above Earth’s atmosphere at a younger age. But this will not be Katya’s first approach to space and its enigmas, since she is an electrical engineer and collaborated with NASA for more than four years. She is now preparing to travel aboard the New Shepard rocket. We tell you her story.
“I can do all the things I wanted to do and now even more (…)”, is one of the phrases that San Diego City College quotes on its website, where it recognizes the performance of the young woman from Guadalajara.
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Katya Echazarreta has not only worked with NASA but has a long list of achievements at a very young age. The Mexican engineer is vice president of the Society of Women Engineers and a member of Phi Theta Kappa, an international honor society for public university students.
For her outstanding academic performance, Katya was awarded an undergraduate scholarship by San Diego City College. Recently, she also received financial support from the US space agency to conduct scientific research at Rutgers University, the eighth oldest in the United States.
But things did not always look like this for Katya, because at the age of seven she left the city where she was from and traveled, as an immigrant, to the United States, along with her mother and father. Precisely her immigration process kept her away from her family for five years, with whom she met again when she was already a 12-year-old teenager.
“My grandmother told me: ‘remember that, although we are separated, we are under the same sky. That message has always stayed with me,” the young woman recalled.
Katya’s story prompted her to be selected to become one of the future space tourists by the “Space for Humanity” astronaut program, dedicated to sponsoring the trip of citizens to space.
Selected among more than 7 thousand applicants from more than 100 countries, in this fifth mission Katya will represent women interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics because although, since the news was announced, Katya has been Known all over the world, he has an Instagram account where he shares different and fun experiments based on the most complex theories of science.
Along with Katya, four more tourists will travel: Evan Dick, (pilot), Jaison Robinson (co-founder of the technology company Dream Variation Ventures), Victor Vescovo (explorer and co-founder of Insight Equity), and the Brazilian Victor Correa Hespanha (engineer); with the latter, he will share the “Perspective Effect”, which cosmonauts experience during space flights.
The Mexican engineer claims to be prepared to travel to space and return to Earth to continue changing the world.
