The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
If you peer at the sky and, perhaps, see a constellation-like strand, be consoled, instead of fearful about alleged spies. Think of a star—not just a star, which winks, but someone who might smile, someone you had known.
Do you recognize the reference to The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s enchanting fable? The prince assured us that any one who has deeply touched us, whether face-to-face or from miles away, even among the constellations, will be as close as you wish him or her to be your star.
You and I, as Filipinos, have one actually, who left on what I had imagined “her first own shuttle flight powered by angelic bodies” after whom she was named, Angelita Albano Castro Kelly, known by most as the first Filipino and first woman at the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), buried in Bowie, Maryland, a week ago today.
How joyful it must have been for her to view from the spheres, the Nasa satellites of which she had a hand, orbiting the equator. More precisely, she was, as she said with childlike eyes twinkling, in an interview with Sirib Express, “the first woman MOM (Missions Operation Manager)” of the widely written about, “Earth Observing System (EOS) Project, the centerpiece of Nasa’s ‘Earth Science Enterprise’ program.”
One could even say that she birthed it, having been responsible “for developing the overall EOS Mission Operations Concept, which served as a basis for all the EOS missions,” according to a New American Media article. Also called by Nasa, the “Afternoon Constellation, or the A-Train, this significant subset of [its] current operating major satellite missions, (six satellites at present) are in a polar orbit…within seconds to minutes of each other.”
So close in their “near-simultaneous observations of a wide variety of parameters…on Earth-system science,” related to climate change, Kelly by this time recognized and awarded annually for 40 years for her supervisory and management skills in Nasa’s “highly visible projects”, such as the Space Shuttle Manned Flight Missions and the Nasa/Goddard Space Flight Center’s Spacelab Data Processing Facility (SLDPF), as MOM, ensured “that missions flying together in the same orbital path operate safely and in cooperation with each other.”
Does this hint at the idea of mothering behind her success? Add to that, how she “interfaced with the science and instrument teams for the three missions, including international partners” by skillfully listening as she revealed in the interview. Doesn’t it make you imagine a huge family?
In fact, it’s family that got her to Nasa. If, as the youngest in a brood of six orphaned by their father, Dr. Miguel Albano Castro, Sr. during WWII, she had not given in to the filial tug of her brothers and sisters—by then in Maryland for advanced studies—and at 19, pursued a Stanford scholarship, soon after finishing a mathematics and physics degree, summa cum laude, at the University of Santo Tomas, returned as professor in a simple future she had cast, you and I would have a different star today. But she did.
With her mother, Eufemia Lagasca Albano, she left in 1962, around the time John Glenn’s Friendship 7 visited Manila, her only idea of outer space then, joined her siblings, enrolled at the University of Maryland for graduate studies in physics and met Francis J. Kelly, who she would turn to with girlish shyness, unseen in the frame during the Sirib interview, “the scientist in the family,” her physicist-husband.
Fourteen months after their third child, she took what she would recall as “an utterly simple math exam” for a job at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and from thereon, “cracked the ceiling” in what used to be a man’s universe, with her legacy of deep trust in God, faith that can move mountains, treasured family values, and the right priorities.
Lived by her, such guides as we carry her within beam even now at the mere thought of night.
