Reaching for the Stars : 1st Latina Astronaut Reminds Students of Education’s Value

Jennafer McCabe, a first-grader at Brookside Elementary School in Oak Park, saw her cousin, Ellen, off on a business trip last month. When Ellen paid a return visit Wednesday, Jennafer’s entire school turned out to greet her. They even gave her a T-shirt.

But then, how many kids have relatives who take their business trips aboard a space shuttle?

Cousin Ellen is astronaut Ellen Ochoa, whose nine-day mission last month aboard the shuttle Discovery was a milestone of sorts. Ochoa, a mission specialist who lives in Houston, was the first Latina astronaut.

Ochoa launched a satellite from the payload bay using the shuttle’s 50-foot robotic arm. Two days later, Ochoa nabbed the satellite back again and gently lowered it into the cargo bay.

The satellite, dubbed the Spartan, measured ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. And ozone, a gas that shields Earth’s surface from harmful solar radiation, was something nearly every Brookside student had heard about.

“It was really kind of a mystery story,” Ochoa explained. “It’s not something we can see.”

Ochoa showed a film of her mission, covering the shuttle’s fiery liftoff to its graceful touchdown.

But Jennafer wasn’t as awed as the other students by the pictures of the huge booster rockets igniting. She had seen the launch firsthand, along with about 30 of Ochoa’s other relatives, from a vantage point in a Florida swamp.

“It was like a big fireball that just went floating up,” recalled Jennafer, who had stayed up way past her bedtime to watch the liftoff. “It woke you up.”

Ochoa’s movie had some other neat stuff, such as some of the 148 sunsets the crew saw in orbit--one every 90 minutes (“That’s cool,” said fifth-grader Michael Wasserman). There was a big floating ball of water that two astronauts sucked dry with straws. And Ochoa, a classical flutist, even got to play her flute in orbit.

One girl wondered why Ochoa’s hair was flying all over the place in space.

Ochoa answered her question with another one.

“What do you think pulls it down here?” Ochoa asked.

“Gravity!” the students replied.

Ochoa wore her blue NASA flight suit, complete with patches commemorating her mission and her astronaut’s class and her pilot’s wings. The uniform inspired one student to remark that his father gives him stickers when he does “good in school and stuff.”

Ochoa put in a plug for education, something she has a lot of. She was valedictorian of her class at San Diego State University and received a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

“You have to work hard in school because that’s something NASA looks at if you want to be an astronaut,” she said.

That desire may not run in the family. Jennafer said she hasn’t exactly been bitten by the space bug from her cousin’s adventures.

“I learned that being an astronaut is not something that would be fun, but would be serious,” she said.

Ochoa’s visit to Oak Park turned into a family reunion of sorts. Aunt Gloria McCabe lives in Oak Park along with her son and daughter-in-law, Brent and Andrea McCabe--Jennafer’s parents. Ochoa’s mother, Rosanne, also came from La Mesa in San Diego County.

Ochoa also stopped in Jennafer’s classroom and answered a few more spacey questions from other first-graders.

Nigel Ryan Ferrey posed a question that had been on more than a few young minds that morning: “Did you see any aliens on the moon?”