Chang to Enter Astronaut Hall of Fame

Costa Rican physicist and space rocket designer Dr. Franklin Chang will be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) announced Thursday.

Thus, he will join his boyhood heroes--men like Alan Shepherd, the first North American in space, John Glenn, the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the earth and Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon.

Some 80 men and women are members of this elite group of those who amazed and thrilled two generations of humanity around the world -- including a Costa Rican boy in Escazu with a burning ambition to join his heroes.

This was a boy who built himself a "space craft" out of cardboard and stayed outside in it during one of the early NASA flights, listening to the radio. His mother told this reporter years ago that he refused to abandon his "mission" until the U.S. astronaut had safely been picked up at sea.

Armed with only a high school diploma -- and nearly no English -- with little money he went to the United States and somehow got a college education and an invitation to join the people "with the right stuff" at NASA.

Through determination, sacrifice and ability -- NASA doesn't give handouts -- he later went on seven space flights, a record he shares with Jerry Lynn Ross. He spent in all, 66 days, 18 hours and 16 minutes in orbit, the first Latin astronaut.

Far from relaxing on his laurels, the Costa Rican hero is instrumental in the design of the Ad Astra plasma rocket engine, a revolutionary concept that may make chemical fueled rockets obsolete, may be used to correct the orbit of the International Space Station and eventually take man to Mars -- faster and cheaper than is possible now.

From the Ad Astra facilities in Liberia (Guanacaste province) he told the newspaper La Nacion more formally than he usually speaks, "I receive this recognition humbly, and it fills me with pride to think I'll be side by side with people who were my heroes."

The official induction will be held May 5. Ironically, he does not know the relatively new Hall of Fame facilities -- he has been too busy with his rocket engine. Since 2003, naming of inductees has been an annual NASA event.

Chang will share the spotlight with two other astronaut inductees, U.S. Air Force engineer Kevin Chilton, a Chang friend of many years, and Charles J. Precourt, with whom Chang flew a mission to the MIR space station in 1998.