Trivia

A Costa Rican-American engineer, physicist and former NASA astronaut, one of the first Hispanic Americans to go into space and the first naturalized U.S. citizen to become an astronaut.

He is a veteran of seven Space Shuttle missions, making him the record holder as of 2008 for the most spaceflights, a record he shares with Jerry L. Ross.

His father was of Chinese descent and his mother a Spanish Costa Rican.

He studied in high schools in both Costa Rica and the United States. He earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1973, and a Sc.D. degree in applied plasma physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.

He was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 1980 and his first Shuttle flight was in 1986.

In 2002, he performed three EVAs (spacewalks) with Philippe Perrin as part of the construction team building the International Space Station.

In 2005, he retired from NASA and went on to become the the founder and President of Ad Astra Rocket Company, an advanced rocket technology company in North America, with operations in Webster, Texas and Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

He invented and patented the VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket), an electro-magnetic thruster for spacecraft propulsion.

Throughout his career, he promoted science and space technology in Latin America.

He helped to form The Chaga Space Project, a collaboration of 5 countries in the study of potential natural inhibitors to Chagas disease in the microgravity of space. The project resulted in the first multinational flown experiment from Latin America in protein crystallization with medical applications.

He married interior designer Dr. Peggy Marguerite Stafford (of Alexandria, Louisiana), the founder of Stafford Tile and Stone; they have four daughters.

One of his daughters, Sonia Rosa Chang-Diaz (born March 31, 1978), is an American politician elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 2009.