Two NASA Engineers Try Out Politics

When Natalia Sanchez was fourteen, she travelled from her home in Bogotá, Colombia, to San Francisco to spend the summer with an aunt. During her stay, she took dozens of pictures of freeways—the on-ramps and off-ramps, the way the roads overlapped. “To me, it looked like ‘The Jetsons,’ “ Sanchez told me recently. “This country was a different world. I realized that if we wanted to pursue bigger things, we had to get out of Colombia.” Sanchez had been dreaming big for a while. After watching Carl Sagan’s television series “Cosmos” when she was eight, she had become obsessed with outer space. She wanted to explore the universe, and that meant getting to NASA.