Mexican-born engineer pushing for more diversity in space

ATLANTA (AP) — Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Katya Echazarreta was encouraged to abandon her dreams of traveling to space.

“Everyone around me — family, friends, teachers — I just kept hearing the same thing: That’s not for you,” Echazarreta told The Associated Press.

Echazarreta, 26, will prove them wrong Saturday when she joins a diverse international crew boarding the fifth passenger flight by Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space travel venture.

She and five others, including Victor Correa Hespanha, the second Brazilian to fly to space, will blast off from Texas atop a New Shepard rocket for a 10-minute flight. The automated flight should reach an altitude of roughly 66 miles (106 kilometers) before parachuting into the desert.

Echazarreta, whose flight is sponsored by the nonprofit Space for Humanity, will be the first Mexican-born woman and one of the youngest women to fly to space. She was chosen from more than 7,000 applicants in more than 100 countries.

The flight comes as Blue Origin competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic for space tourism dollars and efforts aimed to increase diversity in space travel, which long has been dominated by white men.

Of the more than 600 people who have been to space since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961, fewer than 80 have been women and fewer than three dozen have been Black, Indigenous or Latino.

In April, NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins arrived at the International Space Station, the first Black woman assigned a long-duration mission there.

Earlier this year, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the agency’s first-ever equity plan “to further identify and remove the barriers that limit opportunity in underserved and underrepresented communities.”

Tabbetha Dobbins,...