First Mexican-born woman to travel space visits Parlier

PARLIER – Katya “Kat” Echazarreta, 29, the first Mexican-born woman to go into outer space, told the Parlier High School students who packed the school’s north gym to hear her speak that hard work – even the Herculean workload she carried as a high school student – was not enough to lift a person from a situation that keeps them down.

“You may not want to hear this,” Echazarreta told the crowd, “but working three or four jobs, like I did, wouldn’t get me out of where I was. Something else had to change.”

It was a sobering yet grounded message coming from the woman who traveled into space in 2022 on a Blue Origin NS-21 flight as a citizen astronaut for Space for Humanity, a nonprofit astronautics company, when she was 26. 

This is not to say the message she delivered on Aug. 29, 2024 was fatalistic. Far from it. As one of only 700 people in history to take the five-minute express – Echazarreta informed the crowd it only takes that long to reach space when one is traveling by rocket – to the outer reaches, she said self-reliance is the key to achieving one’s dreams.

Because “everyone out there is betting on your failure,” she said.

THINGS ARE NOT SO SIMPLE

After greeting the crowd, Echazarreta said she needed to address the elephant in the room.

“That’s me; I’m six months pregnant,” she said, referring to her discernible bump. From there, she mentioned the odyssey that took her from Mexico as a child to the states.

“I knew from a very young age I wanted to go to space,” she said. “Imagine this little Mexican girl telling everyone she met that, one day, she was going to be an astronaut.” Except, “things are not so simple,” she said.

Echazarreta is the oldest of four siblings. When she was in high school, her parents divorced.

“My father took divorce to mean completely separating from his family,” she said. Her father took everything from the family. The car. The bank accounts. Her mother told her children to grab a bed sheet and take what they could carry. Echazarreta said she grabbed some clothes and books.

The family stayed with a friend. Echazarreta had to become the breadwinner.

“I got up at five in the morning,” she said. “I went to school. Then I went to my first job. Then I went to my second job. Then my third and then my fourth. I got home at midnight, studied for two hours and tried to sleep. This was my life. Day in and day out.”

Despite maintaining a perfect academic record, she knew nothing would change unless she changed it. Which meant changing her circumstances. Which is why she told her audience that simply killing yourself by working hard is not enough.

She received two scholarships to attend UCLA. But things were not so simple.

“They didn’t want us there,” she said. The “they” she referenced were other students as well as some faculty members; and the referenced “us” were Latinos.

“When I went to classes, my classmates would place a backpack on the empty seat or say a friend was coming. Just so I wouldn’t sit there,” she said. “And, on those occasions I didn’t know an answer, one faculty member said I should leave and give up my place to someone who deserved it.”

Echazarreta remembered returning to her dorm in tears. She wanted to quit.

“I thought, ‘Do something else. What else can I do?’ But there was nothing else,” she said. She added, “Because if I gave up and returned home, the only thing waiting for me was working four jobs.”

And, as the world now knows, she did not give up.

LIFE IN SPACE

“Earth is round,” she said, “in case anyone was wondering.” While this was not a surprising revelation, she said living in zero gravity did have its surprises.

“Everything in space is upside down,” she said; meaning, terrestrial-based brains need to acclimate to an environment that is not tethered to, well, anything.

“And everything floats,” she said. “That means everything inside of you floats. Including your blood (and other bodily fluids). All of this required getting used to.”

The question she is most often asked: how do you go to the bathroom?

“In a diaper,” she said. She recounted the story of Alan Shepherd, the first American to fly into space. Shepherd’s launch was repeatedly delayed. As he waited on the launchpad, the advised mission control he had to urinate. Extricating him from his suit would be too time consuming.

“They told him to go in his suit,” said Echazarreta. “So, if you ever go into space, wear the diaper.”

When she returned from space, Echazarreta said she was besieged with interview requests and job offers. She said she went home to Mexico. The fact that she was the only Mexican-born woman to travel to space and that 40 years separated her trip from the first time a Mexican-born astronaut had made the trip, weighed on her mind.

She said she spoke to students in the local schools. They wanted to know what it would take for them to be her; to be an astronaut.

But things are not so simple.

She again reminded the audience that hard work wasn’t enough if circumstances stood in the way – Mexico had no space facilities. Worse, there was nothing in the Mexican constitution declaring that it held title to the space above the country.

The constitution had to be changed. Echazarreta said she was told she should go back to the states, go back to her job; it was impossible.

“I was told, ‘You’ll never get anything done. There’s this reform to change the constitution, because that is what you’ll need to do. And that’s been waiting for the past six years and nobody has paid any attention to it and they’re not going to now’,” Echazarreta said.

Despite this, Echazarreta kept to her goal, and “in four months, we passed a constitutional reform in Mexico to prioritize space activities for the first time in history,” she said. “With this reform approved in the (Mexican) congress and, hopefully, pretty soon in the senate, that means we’re going to see the first launchpad constructed in Mexico within the next five years.”