Framing figure — Ellen Ochoa
Ellen Ochoa was born on 10 May 1958 in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in La Mesa, California, the middle child of five. She took a Bachelor of Science in physics from San Diego State University in 1980, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, then a Master of Science in 1981 and a doctorate in 1985, both in electrical engineering from Stanford. As a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA's Ames Research Center she worked on optical systems for automated information processing, and holds three patents in optical inspection and object recognition. NASA selected her as an astronaut in January 1990. In 1993 she flew on STS-56 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, becoming the first Hispanic woman to go to space; she went on to log four spaceflights and nearly 1,000 hours in orbit. On 1 January 2013 she became the eleventh director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, the first Hispanic and second woman to hold the post, serving until May 2018.
The point is not the flight. It is that the engineering behind it — optical inspection systems built to detect defects in repeating patterns, methods for recognising texture in an image — is the same category of work a California machine shop performs on a smaller and more local scale: verifiable process, not credential by claim.
That is the whole logic of a supply chain. A prime cannot audit an engineer's or a supplier's biography, and does not try. It reads the certificate, the process capability study, the first-article inspection and the corrective-action file, and reads nothing else. The launch-provider concentration in this issue is a request for evidence from anyone who already holds it.