Katya Echazarreta: "I want to return to space, but I want to arrive with Mexico"

The astronaut, Katya Echazarreta, on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, this Wednesday. Gladys Serrano (EL PAÍS)

She leaves the Senate erect, in a designer suit and heels, escorted by her team, which includes her mother and her brother, they ask her for a photo and she smiles, a video for a fan and she smiles, her Saturn earrings sparkle in the sun while posing for portraits as if that's what she's done forever.

There is a new star who is walking along the Paseo de la Reforma and she is not an actress or a singer: she is an astronaut.

Katya Echazarreta (Guadalajara, 27 years old) came to the spotlight just a few months ago when she became the first Mexican to go into space, she was also the youngest woman to do so.

This NASA engineer was chosen by the Space For Humanity organization among 7,000 candidates for a small 10-minute flight that crossed the land border.

And that, which could be the goal, became only the starting shot.

She has now left her job at the North American space agency to bet on the one in Mexico.

Where is her future?

"I definitely want to go back to space, I want to go to the Moon, but I want to go to Mexico."

And she says it so sure that it seems possible.

Katya's story is unlikely.

At the age of seven, she moved with her family from Guadalajara to San Diego.

Her sister had suffered from meningitis that had left her with paralysis as a sequel and in the Jalisco capital they could not find a school adapted for her.

They crossed the border.

She remembers the difficulty of those early years: "Of course the children make fun of you, they don't let you enter their circles, especially because you can't communicate, you don't speak the language."

In 2012 he decided to study electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She mentions the exact year because it was the time that NASA shut down its shuttle program, the ones that carried crew members into space.

“When they closed it, nobody knew what the future of the agency would be, we did not know if we were going to continue to the Moon.

The dreams that we currently have for the space industry were not seen as possible at that time," he says, "and that is when I decided that this is what I want to do, that if, for example, NASA was only going to hire five people, I was going to be one of those five.”

The prediction comes true a few years later when the North American agency enters as an intern, to end up in a permanent position.

In this time she has participated in five missions, one of them that of the

robot , a pioneer in the exploration of Mars.

She believes that she dares to take on all the new challenges and her perseverance are her strengths as her engineer: “They would propose a project to me about something that I had never done before and I said 'give it to me.'

That helped me get to important positions in my first year as an engineer.”

A space dominated by men

The space race has always been an environment dominated by them.

NASA canceled its female astronaut program in 1960 for sexism: they outperformed men and still excluded them.

Until 2013, a joint promotion was not achieved in the American agency.

In Europe, there is currently only one active cosmonaut.

Even now, 50 years after

landed on the moon, people are still looking for a hole in it for a woman to step on.

In this scenario, Katya Echazarreta, then 26 years old, went into space.

In June, the young woman flew with five other crew members on a Blue Origin rocket, the company of Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos, in an experiment that seeks to allow citizens to reach space and change their perspective.

She had successfully passed grueling training and before that she had been chosen ahead of 7,000 other people.

She fulfilled the promise she made to herself at the age of seven, when she was already obsessed with what was up there.

But then she was told that she was stealing her seat from a man "who deserved it."

She calmly answers: "You can't take away what is theirs from someone and going into space was always mine."

After that, she starred in magazine covers, messages from dozens of girls who wanted to do the same as her.

“I've always believed that you can't be what you can't see,” she says of the importance of representation.

Also, without changing what she already was.

“I am not trading my femininity in exchange for achieving such a position.

I am presenting a version of a woman who is an engineer, who is interested in science, and who does not fit the stereotypes of what an engineer should look like, ”she says with the glitter perfectly placed on her eyelids.

"I think I've spent my life breaking stereotypes, since I was a child I was always a very strong person, my mother always motivated me and told me: 'Whatever you want to do, you can do,'" she points out and then says, firmly, without a doubt: “I have achieved everything I wanted and I have put in the time”.

With that unbeatable determination, Katya now manages in the corridors of the Senate and the Mexican Congress, where she has come to try to convince legislators to make a change in articles 28 and 73 of the Constitution to grant more resources to the space industry. mexican.

In a risky move, Echazarreta has given up a promising future at NASA to help open the gates of space to her country.

“I could have moved up the ranks, grown as an engineer, eventually applied to an American astronaut program, it would have been much easier that way, of course, but for me it wasn't enough.

Because I understand that those opportunities for my country are not there and I want to create those opportunities in Mexico”, she affirms.

The Mexican space industry is weak, at the service of its neighboring giant.

For example, for 2020 NASA received around 22.6 billion dollars;

that of China, about 11,000 million dollars, the European Space Agency has to spend almost 8,000, and the Mexican, created just 10 years ago, allocated three.

There is no way to compete, which is why a couple of years ago he considered betting on a Latin American space agency.

In addition, Echazarreta points out that space projects are being given from Mexico to foreign companies, instead of their own, because they already have the infrastructure.

“They see it much easier, but what they don't realize is that they are spending a lot more paying another country that doesn't even take us as a priority, that gives us the information that we are buying as their last option.

The young woman wanted to take advantage of the visibility she now has to put her finger on the line: Mexico's opportunity is now, then there will be no way to join the race.

“I want to help Mexico to be an international player in the space industry,” she insists.

For 2025, the mission that returns to take humans to the Moon is planned.

Half a century after the first arrival, six world powers have embarked on the same goal: show technological muscle, explore the enormous mineral reserves of the Moon, set up a base and turn it into a way station to reach the final goal, Mars.

“Space is no longer something of the future, it is already here.

In the next 10 years we are going to be able to be in space, we are going to need people who can work with different specialties, not just scientists or engineers", he proposes optimistically, "if Mexico does not start promoting space issues now, it will be left behind”.

To help this, the astronaut is setting up a foundation to financially support Mexican students and companies that want to train, create technology or investigate issues related to space development.

She expects that the funds for these aids will come from other larger companies that are interested in Mexico having these capabilities.

The Mexican Space Agency has already announced its collaboration with Echazarreta.

“I would love to see a mission to space for Mexicans,

selected and trained in Mexico.

That we no longer have to ask for information or wait to see that they give us something to use, and I would like to see myself as the person who is promoting this", he says, waits and affirms, emphatically: "I see my future as the future of space in Mexico.

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