Like many red-blooded American teens coming of age during the 1960s space race, Franklin Chang-Diaz dreamed of chasing cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to the stars.

There was a hitch, of course. Chang-Diaz wasn’t American. He lived outside the United States. And the Costa Rican didn’t even speak English.

No matter. Chang-Diaz would overcome these obstacles and more to fly a record-tying seven missions aboard the space shuttle. Along the way the physicist would also develop a plasma rocket that promises a revolutionary approach to spaceflight.

The rocket, potentially, could blast the next generation of astronauts to Mars in just 39 days, about one fifth of the time required by existing rocketry.

At a time when much of Houston’s space community is openly hostile to President Barack Obama’s desire to remake NASA’s human spaceflight program, Chang-Diaz, 60, is among those welcoming it.

“Even though this transition is very strong medicine, and it is being applied at a very awkward moment, it is the right thing to do,” he said.

From his perspective, if humans are ever to venture substantially beyond Earth’s moon, they’ll need advanced propulsion systems to do so.

And the sooner NASA begins reinvesting in them — funding for advanced propulsion dried up in 2005 when money was diverted into the Constellation program to build conventional rockets to send astronauts back to the moon

— the better, says Chang-Diaz, whose Clear Lake rocket company, Ad Astra, could profit from such a change.

On Thursday, in a speech to promote his space policy plans, Obama confirmed that it will take new technologies for NASA to explore deeper into the solar system.

“We’ve got to do it in a smart way,” he said at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “We can’t keep doing the same old things as before.”

One-way ticket to U.S.
Chang-Diaz’s story begins in a San José bank, where he worked as a teller after graduating from high school to scrabble together enough money to come to the United States. After nine months Chang-Diaz had saved $50 and convinced his dad, a construction foreman, to buy him a one-way ticket to America.

In 1968 he arrived in Hartford, Conn., to stay with distant relatives. Not speaking English, he enrolled in a local high school to learn the language and, in time, apply to college.

“Of course it was a disaster,” Chang-Diaz recalled. “The first marking period I failed everything. But from being at the bottom I began to improve, and towards the end of the year I was near the top of the class.”

So promising a student was he that Chang-Diaz earned a partial scholarship to the University of Connecticut. He sailed through college and, later, graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying mechanical engineering and physics, with an interest in plasma, an electrically charged gas that responds to electromagnetic fields.

By 1979, Chang-Diaz was a citizen, and NASA was seeking scientists for its new space shuttle program. In 1980, he became NASA’s first Hispanic astronaut, moved to Houston, and six years later launched aboard Columbia.

“I flew on all of the space shuttles,” he said. “I flew on Mir. I flew on the International Space Station. I just got to experience everything. Having come from a little country in Central America, sometimes it’s amazing for me to even believe.”

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/6964775.html

Well good for him. He did very well.