Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
In 1995, Michael López-Alegría became the first Spanish-American to fly into outer space. López-Alegría, who had been born in Madrid in 1958, grew up in Mission Viejo, California. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy, earning a B.S. in systems engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1980 and an M.S. in aeronautical engineering from the... Continue Reading →
John Daniel “Danny” Olivas became the first U.S.-born man of Mexican descent to travel to space. (Rodolfo Neri Vela, who was part of a NASA Space Shuttle mission in 1985, had been born in Mexico; Ellen Ochoa, whose first spaceflight took place in 1993, was the first U.S.-born person of Mexican descent to make it... Continue Reading →
Friday, September 15 marks the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S. Here is the first of our commemorative posts of Hispanic transportation pioneers. In June 1991, Sidney M. Gutierrez became the first U.S.-born Hispanic astronaut to travel into outer space. (Franklin R. Chang Díaz, who in 1986 had become the first Hispanic-American... Continue Reading →
In the spring of 1985, Taylor Gun-Jin Wang became the first Chinese-American to travel into outer space. Wang had been born in the Jiangxi Province of southeast China in 1940. He and his family moved to Taiwan in 1952, and he graduated from the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan University in Taipei. Wang... Continue Reading →
During the summer of 1992, Eugene Huu-Chau Trinh became the first Vietnamese-American to travel to outer space when he flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia as a payload specialist on mission STS-50. This mission lasted from June 25 to July 9 of that year. Trinh was born in 1950 in Saigon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City)... Continue Reading →
In December 2006, Sunita Williams became only the second woman of Indian descent to travel to outer space when she was launched on board Space Shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station (ISS). Kalpana Chawla had become the first woman of Indian descent to travel to outer space when she flew on board Space Shuttle... Continue Reading →
In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly into outer space. (Two female USSR cosmonauts, Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya, had already traveled into orbit.) Ride, who was 32 at the time of her first space flight, also established a still-intact record as the youngest U.S. astronaut to make such a journey.... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 