The Brave One

2 Pages 461 Words

Born May 10, 1958, in Los Angeles, California, Ellen Ochoa became the first fe-male Hispanic astronaut in 1990. Ellen Ochoa first dreamed of taking part in a space flight during her graduate-school days, when several of her fellow students applied to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronaut-training program. While they did not make the final cut, she persevered throughout the lengthy and difficult selection process and finally achieved her goal in 1990, making her the first female His-panic astronaut in NASA history. Since then, Ochoa has spent hundreds of hours in space as a member of three different shuttle crews performing vital research and taking part in historic firsts. Such high-profile success has made her a role model for students across the nation, an assignment Ochoa has accepted with pride and enthusiasm.

Although she was born in Los Angeles, California, Ellen Ochoa has always re-garded the suburban San Diego community of La Mesa as her hometown. She, her sister, and three brothers grew up in a single-parent household headed by her mother, Rosanne; her father left the family when Ellen was in junior high school. Rosanne Ochoa was a firm believer in the value of education and the idea that a person can succeed at anything if he or she tries hard enough. (She herself took college classes over more than two dec-ades while raising her family and eventually earned three degrees.) Ochoa was therefore encouraged to excel as far back as she can remember. She developed a love of math in particular and was an exceptionally good student, graduating from high school at the top of her class. In addition, Ochoa was (and still is) very fond of music and earned recogni-tion during her teen years as a classical flutist.

Ochoa headed off to San Diego State University in 1975 and obtained her bache-lor's degree in physics (with top academic honors) in 1980. She then went on to graduate school at Stanford Unive...