“Exploring is why I’m an astronaut,” says Peru-born, California-raised Carlos Noriega. “It’s human nature to want to know what’s around the next corner—and we’ll help humanity find out.” 

CLICK IMAGE TO START SLIDESHOW MISSIONS ACCOMPLISHED

In fact, Franklin Chang-Díaz, a scientist and former astronaut with seven space missions to his credit —a record equaled by only one other astronaut—believes the space program’s real goal is nothing less than the survival of humanity. He believes outer space is where many of our descendants will live. “Earth is overpopulated,” says Chang-Díaz, the first U.S. Hispanic astronaut. “If we don’t do something soon, it may be too late.”

At a Critical Juncture
More immediate factors are also pushing NASA to step up its space exploration program. By 2010 the U.S. shuttle program will end, something that Madrid-born astronaut Miguel Lopez-Alegria calls a critical moment for “national pride and leadership. We’ll have no U.S. access to space,” he says. “There will be no more space shuttle after 2010. The International Space Station will last until 2015 or 2020.”

CLICK IMAGE TO START TRIVIA QUIZ ON HISPANICS IN SPACE EXPLORATION

In response, NASA is gearing up the next generation of space vehicles with Constellation, a program aimed at getting us back to the moon by 2020 and to Mars soon after. As deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, astronaut, inventor, and scientist Ellen Ochoa is poised to play a big part in that adventure.

Constellation’s first job, which Ochoa hopes will begin in 2015, will be to take U.S. and foreign astronauts to the International Space Station, an orbiting lab and home in space for those on extended missions.

But “the key point is to move past the space station and into lunar orbit,” said Ochoa, 51, at the 2009 Joint Annual Conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. [Watch Ochoa speak at the conference.] That will happen in the second stage of the Constellation program. Between 2020 and 2025, a four-person team is slated to land on the moon’s surface for a long sojourn to “get ready for living in space as long as they’ll have to when they go to Mars,” says Noriega. They’ll stay at an international outpost at the south pole of the moon, where 14 days of sunlight are followed by 14 days in the dark.

The daunting task of making sure nothing goes wrong is very much up to Noriega. As director of the Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance Office of the Constellation Program at the Johnson Space Center, “My job is to ensure that space flights are executed with the highest possibility of success,” he says.

Revving Up Rocket Ships

“The big goal is to understand how our planet functions—to see it from the outside, monitor climate, see what extremes are coming so we can prepare for them.” —Astronaut José M. Hernández

Constellation may be NASA’s plan for the next step in space, but Franklin Chang-Díaz could just give it all a quantum boost with what he calls “the rocket ship of the future”: the VASIMR, set to launch in 2012.

Chang-Díaz has been a fan of extraterrestrial exploration since the day it blasted off from the comics and into reality. The Costa Rica-born astronaut and scientist headed the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center from 1993 to 2005, the year he left NASA to found the Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company, dedicated to developing advanced rocket-ship technology.

Ad Astra’s VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) plasma-based system will be intrinsically different from the chemical-fuel-guzzling rockets used by today’s space shuttles, which require huge fuel tanks. VASIMR uses little propellant, but its real difference is speed. “A chemical rocket would take seven months to get to Mars; a plasma rocket, one month,” Chang-Díaz says.

A Changing World
Where will all this exploration take us? Some astronauts suggest it might be to a brighter future. The close cooperation among nations required to build and operate orbiting space stations has already changed the dynamics since the Cold War years.

Noriega was convinced of it while working on the Russian space station MIR. “One day toward the end of the mission, there’s the Russian head of MIR and the American head of the shuttle crew joking and laughing as the world goes by,” he says. “They had been fighter pilots on opposite sides of the Berlin wall. They could have started a war.”

Close cooperation between one-time enemies on the MIR and international space stations “shows we can work together if we want to,” Noriega says. “I was proud to be part of something bigger than myself, bigger than NASA, bigger than the country, for that matter.”

For Chang-Díaz, there is one overriding reason why nations should work together to develop space travel. Because the human race will inevitably outgrow its only planet, he says, “humans are destined to populate space.”

“And maybe,” adds Hernández, “1,000 years from now people will say, ‘Boy, wasn’t it great those guys laid the foundations.’”