Ah, September. This year’s pumpkin-spice-eve month is more than a chance to put huge half-skeletons on your front lawn and start planning your costumes for the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon. Or Halloween, if you’re one of the many who say that’s their favorite holiday. Who can fault folks a little joyful distraction from the 24-7 ramp-up to Election Day?
But September is more than pre-October month. It’s Hispanic American History Month. For that reason, there’s no better time to feature Ellen Ochoa — phenomenal astronaut, entrepreneur, leader, mother and Hispanic American — and learn some life lessons from her.
Ochoa logged more than 1,000 hours in space. She is the recipient of NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal, Exceptional Service Medal and Outstanding Leadership Medal, and the 11th director of the Johnson Space Center.
A family-centered person, Ochoa was born on May 10, 1958, and grew up in Mesa, California with four siblings. Her parents divorced when she was in middle school, during which Ochoa threw herself into learning to play the flute and excelling in school. Though Stanford offered her a full scholarship for her undergraduate degree, she elected to stick close to her mother and siblings, so she attended San Diego University.
Ochoa married Coe Fulmer Miles, a research scientist she met at Ames Research Center in 1990, took her trip to space in 1991, and gave birth to the first of her two children in 1998. While she was a devoted mom, she took additional short trips to space while her boys were young. Decades later, when her younger child graduated from high school, Ochoa retired. At that point in her career, she’d invented new technologies, implemented ideas in space and led the Johnson Space Center to become a more agile, streamlined operation.
Ochoa graduated from San Diego University with a physics degree and initially weighed a future either in business or as a classical flutist. Instead, her mother persuaded her to pursue her master’s at Stanford University where she earned a master’s (1983) and PhD (1985) in electrical engineering. At Stanford, she designed innovative optical systems that could “see” and analyze objects.
Entrepreneurial and innovative long before she trained to be an astronaut, Ochoa took a position at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico where she developed “optical, computerized recordings and models and phenomena in space,” according to Lemelson MIT’s newsletter. Ochoa sought and earned patents as co-inventor for three devices: one that “inspects objects;” another that “identifies and can ‘recognize’ objects;” and a third system “that minimizes distortion in the images taken as an object.” The work helped create crucial systems for space travel. After those accomplishments, she worked at Ames Research Center, headed teams, and developed computer systems for aeronautical expeditions. Her innovations “had the potential to improve not only the gathering of data but also the assessing of the integrity and safety of equipment,” noted MIT.
That’s a solid way to work one’s self into becoming an astronaut. Ochoa and her husband moved to Johnson Space Center, where she had to study astronomy and develop physical fitness in order to qualify to be sent into space.
During her 1,000-plus hours in space, she conducted studies on Earth’s atmosphere and climate, helped deploy satellites and participated in a study on damage to Earth’s ozone.
Leadership-driven, Ochoa served NASA for 30 years, always with a pragmatic eye for the way the future would unfold. NASA’s funding dropped from about 1% of the national budget in 1992 to .50% in 2013, where it’s hovered. During the years when the shuttle program shuttered and NASA faced cuts in funding, Ochoa had the vision to help NASA look to future partnerships with private companies. She helped the Johnson Space Center focus on agility, adjusting its mission and vision.
“We’re well versed in that through our ISS Program where we bring together NASA Centers, international partners, commercial companies that both have spacecraft as well as payloads. You can see that very same kind of thing happening for gateway where you have all these different variety of partners. But you still need to integrate, need to understand how do you actually help each one of these partners achieve what they want to achieve. In some cases it may not be that closely related to what NASA is using it for, but we still want to enable a variety of different activities,” said Ochoa in archival interviews in 2017.
Ochoa encouraged a workplace that fostered diversity in the space program. As she told Women’s History, “Leadership and technical/operations skills are valued in aerospace ... Women simply needed to be given the chance to demonstrate those skills, instead of being dismissed.” While she led the Johnson Space Center, they employed “diverse panels for promotions and selections for development programs, let people volunteer for informal development opportunities, support employee resource groups, encourage mentoring, and track how we are doing, for all underrepresented groups.”
Looking toward the future, Ochoa read Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and encouraged others at Johnson Space Center. Ochoa’s vision toward Mars inspired her to bring Weir in to speak.
“What I really liked about ‘The Martian’ was that it really captured the operations culture that we have here at NASA,” Ochoa said in recorded interviews for the space center’s archives. “A lot of it just sounded so familiar in terms of how you would respond to scenarios and how an actual astronaut stranded on Mars would think about, ‘What do I need to do to survive, what’s the first thing that’s going to kill me, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing?’ That’s exactly how we train — trying to understand what are the risks, what are the hazards, how do I prioritize, how do I work through all of these things. Then of course, once he was able to get back in contact with Earth, having the team on Earth work with him, which is exactly what we do in human spaceflight.”
Though Ochoa retired in 2018, the year her youngest graduated from high school, and moved to Boise, Idaho, she left NASA with a direction that’s inspiring researchers as close to home as Purdue University. On Sept. 12, Purdue is debuting Boilers to Mars, a short film and will feature a panel of speakers. For those inspired by space, register to attend the event at 7 p.m. on Sept 12. Interested in chasing space? There’s more here: https://boilerstomars.com/.
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