Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin-built rocket carried the fifth group of passengers, including the first Mexican-born woman to make such a trip, to the edge of space. The 60-metre-high suborbital rocket took off from Blue Origin’s facilities in West Texas at 9:26 a.m. local time and launched a group of six 62 miles above Earth’s surface (which is commonly considered to form the boundary of outer space).
Most of the passengers paid an undisclosed sum for their seats. But Katya Echazarreta, an engineer and science communicator from Guadalajara, Mexico, was selected from thousands of submissions by a nonprofit called Space for Humanity. The organization’s goal is to send “extraordinary leaders” into space and allow them to experience the overview effect, a phenomenon often reported by astronauts who say seeing Earth from space provides a profound shift in perspective.
Echazarreta told CNN Business that she experienced this overview effect “my own way”: “Looking down and seeing everyone there, all our past, all our mistakes, all our hurdles, everything—everything is there. And when I come back, it’s there.” “All I could think about was that I needed to see this. I needed Latinos to see that. And I think that totally strengthened my mission to continue to lift women and people of color first and foremost.”
Katya Echazarreta Echazarreta is the first Mexican woman to travel to space and the second Mexican after scientist Rodolfo Neri Vela, who joined one of NASA’s Space Shuttle missions in 1985. She moved to the United States with her family at the age of seven, and she remembers feeling overwhelmed in a new place where she didn’t speak the language, and a teacher warned her that she might have to hold back.
Echazarreta said in an Instagram interview, “This really fired me up, and ever since then, since third grade, I’ve somehow been out and about and haven’t stopped.”
Echazarreta, 17 and 18, says she was the breadwinner of her family on a McDonald’s salary: “Sometimes I had four jobs, just finishing college was really important to me.”
Echazarreta is currently working on her MA in engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She previously worked at NASA’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, she. She also follows over 330,000 users on TikTok, hosts a science-focused YouTube series, and hosts the weekend CBS show “Mission Unstoppable.”
On Saturday’s Blue Origin flight, Echazarreta flew with Evan Dick, an investor who was the first to fly with Blue Origin on a flight in December and was the first to recur. Other passengers include Hamish Harding, who lives in the United Arab Emirates and is president of a jet brokerage firm; Jason Robinson, founder of a commercial real estate company; Victor Vescovo, co-founder of a private equity investment firm, and 28-year-old Victor Correa Hespanha, who secured his seat after purchasing an NFT from a group called The Crypto Space Agency.
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