Letterland Unit 28 - prefixes en-, -ment, -ess

My Favorite Space Woman by Luciana

The Ochoa family of seven encircled the television set that summer night in1969. They watched in amazement as the first ever human walked on the moon. All the astronauts were men in 1969. Eleven-year-old Ellen Ochoa felt the excitementof watching with her Mexican-American family. That event inspired many young people to dream of going into space. Ellen didn’t have that dream then. Instead she focused on other dreams. She had great curiosity and a desire to learn about math. She had a for music, too. The instrument she chose was the flute. With her parents’ , Ellen became very interested in science and very in all her school subjects. She graduated with the highest award in her high school. In college, Ellen studied physics, the science of matter, energy, and space. She went on to complete further schooling in engineering. By that time, people like Sally Ride had proven women could be astronauts. Ellen wanted to join them. The first and second time she tried to sign up, she was disappointed. Ellen was employed in a lab and invented new devices and computer programs to be used in space travel. She learned to fly airplanes. On the third try, she heard her name in the of the new astronauts. It took two more years of training for fitness and alertness. She trained underwater to get used to the weightlessness of space. Then Ellen was launched along with four others on the space shuttle. She was proud to be the first Latina woman in space. She was amazed at the loudness of her first launch. One of her jobs in space was to operate a gigantic robotic arm that picked up other satellites and even other astronauts. She would go on three more space trips and spend a total of 1000 hours in space. Later she became the second woman to be the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.