BELL GARDENS : 1st Latina Astronaut Visits High School

When Ellen Ochoa was a teen-ager, she had no plans to fly in space. Now, as NASA’s first Latina astronaut, she has done it twice.

“There weren’t any women astronauts around when I was in high school,” said Ochoa, 36. “I just didn’t know it was a possibility for me. All I knew then was that I liked math and science.”

During a visit to Bell Gardens High School last week, Ochoa’s message to aspiring engineers, scientists and astronauts was short and simple: Take heavy, continual doses of math and science.

“Once you’re firmly grounded in the language of math--which is the language scientists use to communicate--there’s no stopping you,” Ochoa said.

She should know. A generous helping of calculus in high school led to a passion for physics in college. It was at that time that Ochoa first thought of becoming an astronaut.

“I kept on taking more math and science classes and became more and more excited about what to do with them,” said the La Mesa, Calif., native, who was the valedictorian at San Diego State in 1980. She went on to receive an engineering fellowship from Stanford, where she earned her doctorate in electrical engineering in 1985.

Her work at Stanford, which involved filtering images into holographs, resulted in her first patent. Ochoa went on to earn two additional patents in the area of optics before joining NASA as part of a research team investigating space automation.

After becoming chief of NASA’s Intelligent Systems Branch, Ochoa was selected by the space agency to become an astronaut in 1990.

“It was so competitive that I was ecstatic to be selected,” Ochoa told a group of Young Scientists gathered at the high school library. Since then, she has participated in space shuttle missions in 1993 and last month.

“It’s so exciting to see a smart woman doing this,” said student Jessica Gachupin, 17.

Dressed in her blue astronaut’s jumpsuit, Ochoa toured the high school, including stops at two sophomore-level science classes, one conducted in English, the other in the students’ primary language, Spanish.

“One of my dreams is to learn more about space,” said Elizabeth Monreal, 15, who greeted the astronaut in Spanish. She arrived five months ago from the Mexican state of Durango, and her classmates come from Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and El Salvador.

“I don’t know if I want to be an astronaut,” Monreal said. “Right now I’m concentrating on chemistry and biochemistry. I’ll see how that goes.”

Monreal went on to show Ochoa how her class was studying space through the use of a computer simulation.

“The computer program is really easy once you get the hang of it, except for a few of the words that are in English,” Monreal said.