A San Diego City College graduate will become the first Mexican-born woman to fly in space

A San Diego City College graduate who has dreamed of exploring the cosmos since she was a child learned on Monday that her wish will come true on a mission in which she will become the first Mexican-born woman to travel to the space.

Katya Echazarreta was one of six people chosen to take part in a sub-orbital flight that will be organized by Blue Origin, the space rocket and tourism company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Blue Origin officials said Echazarreta, 26, who has considerable experience as an electrical engineer, will serve as a citizen scientist astronaut on behalf of Space for Humanity, a space exploration interest group. based in Denver.

“The news has come. I’m going to space,” she said Monday in a dizzying short video on TikTok.

The date of the mission has not yet been set. But Blue Origin has announced the rest of the crew, which includes: astronaut Evan Dick, Action Aviation president Hamish Harding, civilian production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha and Dream Variation Ventures co-founder Jaison Robinson .

The crew will travel aboard New Shepard, a reusable rocket that will carry humans into space for the first time.

As her many TikTok and YouTube followers know, Echazarreta was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and later moved to San Diego, where she graduated from San Diego City College in May 2016. She later transferred to UCLA. and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. She is completing a master’s degree in engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Her resume also includes work as an electrical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where she helped support missions such as the Mars Perseverance Rover and the upcoming Europa Clipper trip to Jupiter.

She is best known to many as the host of the YouTube Netflix series IRL and as Electric Kat on Mission Unstoppable, a CBS-produced show.

Echazarreta also promotes STEM education, especially on TikTok, where she subtly encourages people by showing herself solving engineering problems. In one post, she sat down at a work table and said, “Engineering can be very frustrating sometimes. It can feel like no matter how much you like the pitch, sometimes it just doesn’t like you back.

“But I realized something recently. I started liking those times when nothing seems to work, because I know what comes next. The moment when I finally understood.