Franklin Chang-Díaz remembers the day his mother told him that a new star soared in the sky. The year was 1957, and the Soviets had just launched a basketball-size satellite named Sputnik, which triggered the space race. The news captivated the 7-year-old boy, who grew up in Venezuela and Costa Rica. “I was lucky to have a set of parents who paid attention to such events,” he says. “That launch was so powerful for all humanity.”

Photograph by Amanda Friedman

From that moment forward, Chang-Díaz lived for space. Cardboard boxes became his rocket ships, his kid cousins his intrepid crew. He listened to news of the first manned spaceflights on the radio. When a museum exhibit touting U.S. efforts in nuclear power came to San José, Costa Rica’s capital city, every afternoon Chang-Díaz rushed to the San José International Airport, where the display was located, to learn more about using atoms for energy. In high school, inspired by a NASA brochure titled "So You Want to Be a Rocket Scientist," Chang-Díaz wrote a letter of inquiry, but Houston fired back a crushing reply: NASA careers were open only to U.S. citizens.


“It drove me crazy,” Chang-Díaz says. “Even today it does. Why would they encourage us to be rocket scientists if we couldn’t be? Space exploration is a worldwide endeavor, and the fact that the United States is on top doesn’t mean they should be the only ones in it.”

The letter was curt, but it did not dampen his resolve. “It just made it clear to me that I had to come to the United States,” he says. “After high school, I got a job in a bank to save money. I told everyone that I was going to go to the United States to become a rocket scientist and an astronaut. Everyone laughed.”

More than 30 years later, there is nothing to laugh about. With single-minded determination, Chang-Díaz has nailed every one of his dreams. He has flown seven shuttle missions, a record equaled only by one other NASA astronaut, Jerry Ross. As the first Hispanic American to go into space, Chang-Díaz is regarded as a hero in Costa Rica. He also became a rocket scientist, and his research in fusion fuel physics may well help get us to Mars one day.

At no point in his childhood did any of this seem possible. His mother, a housewife, feared her son would end up in the Vietnam War if he immigrated to the United States. His father, a construction-site foreman and the son of a Chinese immigrant to Central America, had a different perspective: Immigration was a fact of life; you went where the jobs were. Moved by his son’s efforts at the bank, the elder Chang-Díaz bought him a one-way ticket to America, and the young man went to live with relatives in Connecticut.

Chang-Díaz pocketed all the money he had saved in nine months-$50-and headed for Hartford, where he quickly persuaded school administrators to put him in the high school’s senior class. “Of course I didn’t speak English,” he says, “but I knew it would only be a matter of time. I worked hard at that. I tried not to hang out with Spanish-speaking kids. I got an American girlfriend. As my language skills improved, my grades shot up.”

He was awarded a four-year college scholarship, but the day he showed up at the University of Connecticut, he was confronted with a familiar objection. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, sorry. We can’t give it to you. You’re not an American citizen. We made a mistake.’ You see, they thought I was Puerto Rican, not Costa Rican.” The embarrassment was enough to persuade state officials to grant him a one-year scholarship. That was all he needed: He landed a job in the physics lab and worked his way through school. “How’s that for luck?” he says. “That was one of the most American things that ever happened to me. Here there’s a mind-set that if you work hard, you usually get what you want. It’s still a land of opportunity.”