CHAPTER ONE A LOVE OF MUSIC AND MATH
“What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire—the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.”
—ELLEN OCHOA
Ellen Ochoa brought her flute to her lips. She had been playing the flute for twenty-five years, and like she’d done so many times, she blew into the mouthpiece and moved her fingers on the keys to create a melody. However, this performance was unlike any she had ever given before or would ever give again.
Ordinarily, Ellen might have been practicing on her own or under the guidance of a teacher. She might even have been playing a solo in a concert hall in front of an audience of music aficionados. But this time, there wasn’t even solid ground beneath her feet.
Instead, she was in orbit 160 miles above the earth in a space shuttle called Discovery, a machine unlike any other humankind had ever built. The white-and-blue orb spun outside the windows as Ellen played for four fellow astronauts. Without any sheet music to guide her, she filled the spacecraft’s cabin with songs she knew by heart—like the hymns of the US Marine Corps and the US Navy, and tunes by the classical artists Mozart and Vivaldi.
“It’s a very fond memory,” Ellen told CNN years later. “It was just very peaceful.”
In April 1993 Ellen Ochoa became the first astronaut ever to play the flute in low orbit around the earth. Playing the flute inside a space shuttle was not so different from playing here on Earth, except for one significant detail: To play the instrument, Ellen had to insert her feet inside loops that were attached to Discovery’s floor. Otherwise the microgravity (gravity, the force that keeps us on the ground, is almost nonexistent in space) would have made her float and bounce about the cabin! Even with her feet secure in the loops, Ellen could still feel the force of blowing into the flute make her gently sway.
On that flight, Ellen achieved a greater distinction than playing the flute in orbit. As the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, she made history as the first woman of Hispanic descent to travel to outer space. After years of hard work and perseverance, she had beaten the odds to turn a dream that had once seemed impossible into a reality. And in doing so, she would show many people like her that they, too, could accomplish things that were out of this world.
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Ellen Lauri Ochoa was born on May 10, 1958, in Los Angeles, California, to Joseph and Rosanne Ochoa. Many years would pass before the idea of becoming an astronaut and going into space would first cross her mind. Historic events in the months before and after Ellen’s birth, however, would lead her life toward the stars—literally.
Ellen was born during a time of high tensions between the United States and its rival on the global stage, the Soviet Union (now Russia). The tensions began in the late 1940s, when both nations became the world’s two superpowers following the end of World War II. This period of tension between the United States and Russia was known as the Cold War because the two countries competed for political influence around the world without engaging in direct military battles against each other. The Cold War lasted until December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
During the early years of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union became fascinated with exploring outer space. That fascination ballooned into an obsession that quickly escalated into a competition, as both countries poured enormous amounts of money into their space-exploration programs. Each nation was driven to make the most progress in this new and exciting frontier of science. This fierce competition, which would become known as the Space Race, would engross not just the United States and the Soviet Union but also the entire world. And like in any race, spectators and rivals alike were captivated to see who would be the first.
Both the countries aspired to send people to space. But before they could do that, their scientists needed to learn how to send machines into space to support human endeavors. At the beginning of the Space Race, the Soviet Union got the upper hand. In October 1957, less than a year before Ellen’s birth, the Soviets made history when they launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite—a human-made object that orbits the earth. This marked the beginning of the Space Age, a period of major breakthroughs in space exploration. Just a month after launching Sputnik 1, the Soviet Union made history again when it launched a second satellite, Sputnik 2. On board was a dog named Laika, who became the first animal launched into space.
The success of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 caught the United States by surprise and embarrassed the nation. Not to be outdone by the Soviet Union, the United States felt the need to respond quickly. But the country’s first attempt to launch its own satellite into orbit around the earth was another major embarrassment. In December 1957, just two months after the launch of Sputnik 2, the United States rushed to put a satellite called Vanguard TV-3 into orbit. The launch of Vanguard TV-3 from Cape Canaveral on the eastern coast of Florida was broadcast live on television—only for the aircraft to explode when it was barely four feet above the ground. Newspapers around the world made fun of the United States by giving the failed launch nicknames—“Flopnik” and “Kaputnik.”
After that humiliating moment, the US government gave the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory a challenge: to design and build a new satellite as fast as possible. In just three months, that new satellite, called Explorer 1, was ready to take off. On January 31, 1958, the United States officially entered the Space Age when the US Army successfully launched Explorer 1, the first satellite to carry scientific instruments into space, into orbit.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EXPLORER 1
EXPLORER 1 was not just a milestone for the United States; it also led scientists to discover the Van Allen belts, which are a pair of doughnut-shaped rings of electrons and other charged particles, or radiation, that surround Earth. These particles are held in place by Earth’s magnetic field. The existence of the Van Allen belts was confirmed by another satellite, Explorer 3, which the United States launched in March 1958. It was a major discovery because radiation in large quantities is harmful to humans. Therefore, if they ever wanted to send humans into deep space, scientists would have to figure out how to get astronauts past the radiation of the Van Allen belts safely.
Then, on July 29, when Ellen was not yet three months old, something even bigger happened: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 into law, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), an agency dedicated to space exploration. NASA’s primary goal was to send humans to space, and its creation showed how determined the United States was to beat the Soviet Union in the Space Race.
As a result, Ellen grew up at a time when the Space Race was everywhere, all the time—on television, on the radio, on the front pages of newspapers. It was impossible to ignore. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union scored another important victory when one of its cosmonauts (as astronauts in Russia are known), Yuri Gagarin, became the first human in space when he orbited Earth aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1. When it came to human spaceflight, the Soviet Union was beating the United States hands down.
On May 5, 1961, less than a month after Gagarin made history for the Soviet Union and five days before Ellen celebrated her third birthday, Alan Shepard became the first American and the second person to travel to space. However, he did not orbit Earth, so despite this great milestone, many Americans felt that the United States was losing the Space Race. That feeling only got worse in August of that year, when another Soviet cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, became the second human to orbit Earth.
Anxious to beat the Soviet Union at something, then president John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would land a man on the moon—and soon. In an address to the US Congress on May 25, 1961, he said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
The United States fulfilled a major step toward this ambitious goal almost immediately. On February 20, 1962, after Kennedy’s speech to Congress, US astronaut John Glenn finally became the first American to orbit Earth. Approximately 135 million people—the largest television audience in history at that time—watched John’s spacecraft, the Friendship 7 capsule, take off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, which had become established as the launch site for NASA missions. Thousands gathered along the coast of Florida to see the capsule take off in person.
After circling the planet three times, John safely splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean, near the Turks and Caicos Islands, and was pulled out of the water by the US Navy. His successful mission was a huge moment for the United States in the Space Race, and he was hailed as a hero by Americans across the country. Parades were held in his honor in New York City and in his hometown of New Concord, Ohio. But soon, all eyes would be on the moon.
At Rice University in Houston, Texas, in September 1962, President Kennedy delivered another speech about the country’s plans for visiting the moon. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” the president declared in that famous address. President Kennedy delivered what is now referred to as the moon speech in Houston because the city had been chosen as the site for the Manned Spacecraft Center, the headquarters for NASA’s spaceflight program. Construction had already begun the previous April, and this massive complex, which today is known as the Johnson Space Center (JSC), would play a central role in Ellen’s life.
Kennedy’s challenge led to the creation of NASA’s Apollo program, which, in accordance with the president’s vision, had the goal of both landing a crew of astronauts on the moon and safely returning them to Earth. The quest to put humans on the moon excited not only scientists but the entire country, including children like Ellen. When a launch took place on a school day for Ellen, a staff member would bring a television into the classroom so that students could watch history unfold.
Soon after she finished sixth grade, eleven-year-old Ellen and her family were among the 650 million people across the globe who gathered around their television sets on July 20, 1969, to watch American astronaut Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon. Ellen heard Neil utter the famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and saw him plant the US flag on the moon’s surface. It had taken NASA just eight years to achieve this extraordinary achievement. And for a country that for much of its history had been, and continues to be, divided, it was a rare moment of national unity and pride.
President Kennedy did not live to see his dream of an American moon landing fulfilled—he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963—but the success of the Apollo program is a big part of his legacy. In fact, after his death, President Lyndon B. Johnson—who Johnson Space Center in Houston is named after—renamed the NASA facilities in Florida that serves as a launch site for space missions as the Kennedy Space Center.
WHAT WAS THE APOLLO PROGRAM?
NASA created the APOLLO PROGRAM in 1961 with the goal of landing humans on the moon and returning them to Earth safely. From 1968 to 1972 there were a total of fourteen Apollo missions, including eleven spaceflights. The first four flights were used to test equipment. In 1968 the Apollo 8 mission orbited the moon, which was a precursor to the first moon landing that occurred in 1969.
Over these four years, a total of twenty-four American astronauts made the journey to the moon and back—and twelve of them even walked across its surface. To
this day, the United States is the only country that has landed humans on the moon. By the end of the Apollo program, the United States had spent $25.8 billion, which would be equal to more than $257 billion in today’s money.
While they were on the moon, the astronauts studied its surface and brought back pieces of moon rocks—more than eight hundred pounds of rock in total—for scientists on Earth to study. These rocks have helped scientists learn more about what the moon is made of and how and when the moon and Earth were formed.
However, even as she watched these historic events unfold, young Ellen could not imagine ever putting on a spacesuit and blasting into space herself—simply because she was a girl. In its early days, NASA hired only men to be astronauts. When a girl named Linda Halpern wrote a letter to President Kennedy in 1962 expressing her interest in becoming an astronaut, NASA wrote back saying, “We have no present plans to employ women on spaceflights because of the degree of scientific and flight training, and the physical characteristics, which are required.”
Even after a Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, became the first woman to go to outer space in June 1963, a long time passed before NASA gave American women the same opportunity. While some women did work at NASA in various roles during this time, they typically worked behind the scenes.
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