Franklin Chang-Diaz

Franklin Chang-Diaz is a Costa Rican-American physicist and former NASA astronaut who became the first Hispanic American to fly in space, and who tied the record for most spaceflights by any astronaut, flying seven Space Shuttle missions between 1986 and 2002. After leaving NASA he founded a company developing the VASIMR plasma rocket engine, a proposed advanced propulsion technology intended to make long-duration trips such as a crewed Mars mission faster and more efficient than conventional chemical rockets.