Katya Echazarreta, an electrical and hardware engineer, will become the first woman born in Mexico and one of the youngest women in space, when she and five other international crew members blast off from Texas aboard a New Shepard rocket. for a 10-minute flight launched by Blue Origin.
Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Echazarreta was told to give up her dreams of traveling to space. “From everyone around me — family, friends and teachers — I kept hearing the same thing: That’s not for you,” Echazarreta told The Associated Press. She, 26, will prove them wrong on Saturday.
The flight comes amid efforts to increase diversity in space travel, which has long been dominated by white men.
Of the more than 600 people who have traveled to space since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961, fewer than 80 have been women and fewer than three dozen have been Black, Native American or Latino.
The flight also adds to efforts by Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic for space tourism dollars.
Echazarreta was chosen from more than 7,000 applicants in more than 100 countries. She will be the first passenger sponsored by the non-profit organization Space for Humanity and she will become one of the youngest women to fly in space. Another flight crew member is civil engineer Víctor Correa Hespanha, who will become the second Brazilian to fly into space.
The automated flight will need to reach an altitude of about 106 kilometers (66 miles) before parachuting down into the desert.
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