When he arrived in the United States in 1968, Franklin Chang-Díaz had only $50 in his pocket and did not know how to speak English. At that time he was 18 years old and had the vocation of becoming a true explorer of the cosmos.
Born in San José, Costa Rica (and with Cantonese ancestry on his father’s side), from a young age he seemed destined to succeed. His grandfather had suggested his name, Franklin, in honor of the former American president Roosevelt.
But Franklin Chang-Díaz – years later, “doctor” – was also a child of the Cold War and in particular, the Space Race, that is, the period between 1955 and 1988 in which the US and the USSR competed to conquer outer space.
Like other children of his age, he played at flying into space, but he built the rockets himself. As he recalls, his “projects” became increasingly sophisticated, complex and flew at higher altitudes; these were his first steps in the art of developing scientific projects.
Franklin believes that the real “click” that ended up catalyzing his interest in space was Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957.
“Of course, astronauts and cosmonauts – as they were called in the USSR – of flesh and blood did not begin until 1961, when Yuri Gagarin went into space. Then the Americans entered the competition with characters like Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and all those people became heroes of me and my friends. It was not a very strange thing, we all wanted to be astronauts,” explains Franklin, now 73 years old.
Over time, his peers began to look for more “realistic” professions, but he continued to pursue his dream. At the age of 18, he left for the United States alone.By 1977, Chang-Diaz already had a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in applied plasma physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most competitive universities in the world.
NASA’s first Hispanic astronaut
The rocket boy’s dream finally came true in 1980, when he became NASA’s first Hispanic astronaut. “There was discrimination, maybe not in the sense or the way we understand it today, but simply that I was a different guy, I spoke with an accent. I’m not the typical astronaut of those times, the classic American with a white complexion. I’m more mixed, a weirdo, a strange thing,” the physicist jokes.
And he adds: “The other thing was that almost everyone was in the military. I was never in the military. I come from a country that doesn’t have an army, right? So militarism was not something congruent with me, the clash also came between the scientist, which is what I am, a more scientific type, who questions everything, I am not the military man who is used to following orders, to being a very square person. I am a little rebellious and I question everything.”
During his career he accumulated seven space flights and more than 1,600 hours in space (he is one of the astronauts with the most space hours in history), including 19 hours in space walks. He flew on the Columbia, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis shuttles, and also had to build the current International Space Station (ISS), launched in November 1998.
Love of Costa Rica
Franklin never forgot his homeland. After retiring from NASA in 2005, he founded Ad Astra Rocket, a space technology company with two headquarters: Webster, Texas, and Guanacaste, Costa Rica. This company could also change the future of interplanetary travel through the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Engine (VASIMR).
According to Chang, the flight to Mars takes almost a year with current technologies. He jokes that, in that sense, the chemical rockets we use now are equivalent to the horse-drawn wagon that crossed the United States in the 1800s.
“The plasma engine is going to allow us to actually colonize Mars and colonize more distant places. [This is] another type of transportation, much faster, more efficient, and that is what I have been working on almost all my life. It is a technology that is going to allow us to get to Mars in a matter of maybe a month, a half, two months, but not a year,” he explains.
Ad Astra Rocket Company’s projects
Another of the Ad Astra Rocket Company’s projects is the “decarbonization” of terrestrial transportation through “green hydrogen.” The company “splits” water molecules (composed of hydrogen and oxygen) to then use the hydrogen in electric vehicles.
“It is a type of vehicle that does not use the large batteries that are being used now, but rather produces its own electricity,” says Franklin about the system that is already in operation in his native country.
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