Los Angeles – Bernardo Lopez has traveled far since leaving his native, and then-war-torn, El Salvador right out of high school, arriving in California as an undocumented immigrant and working as, among other things, a truck driver on the way to getting a mechanical engineering degree and a job with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The aerospace engineer, who was born in the El Salvador capital in 1963 and arrived in the United States at the beginning of the 1980s, told how his fascination with outer space began when he was still a little boy.
One of the experiences that remained engraved in his memory forever was seeing a comet in 1976.
“I thought it was so interesting,” he said. “I remember reading in the paper that NASA scientists were observing the comet in Pasadena (California), and I thought that I would like to do that kind of work – but I also knew it would be very hard.”
Time passed and he decided to study for a degree in accounting at the National Institute in Santa Ana province – but by the end of the 1972 violence had escalated and devastation of the country had begun.
The civil war that broke out in the Central American country in 1980 left some 75,000 dead and thousands disappeared over the next 12 years.
“The situation at the Institute was impossible. And my work at the church, in my parish, was increasingly dangerous,” Lopez said, referring to the many church-related social activists who ended up slain by rightist death squads.
“I got out of El Salvador to escape the terror, and that put me on the road away from danger and from all the limitations that my people there still suffer,” he told EFE.
Arriving in Los Angeles he already spoke a little English, but while working as a laborer and truck driver he enrolled in a course to perfect his command of the language so he could start taking classes in physical sciences and mathematics at Los Angeles Community College.
At that point it dawned that he really could aspire to a career in the aerospace industry.
“As somebody said: you can dream, it’s worth dreaming,” he said.
The NASA engineer, now a U.S. citizen, has worked since 1998 on the design of 10 space satellites.
He was recently part of a team studying antenna deployment on the European satellite Mars Explorer, now orbiting the Red Planet.
The communication system operated perfectly and one result was the confirmation that ice exists under the surface of Mars.
At the moment Lopez is concentrating on the design of the satellite Aquarius for Argentina, which will be ready within two years and will be placed in orbit in 2009 with the mission of measuring the concentration of salt in the oceans of the world.
“When salinity is high the degree of evaporation diminishes,” he explained. “That’s vital for the aquiferous cycle and the levels of water in lakes and rivers.”
Lopez said that working in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory was never a lifelong dream, but among his main motives for his dedication to this work is his passion and curiosity for everything to do with physics and mathematics.
“All of us who are willing to struggle and specialize in something have this spirit, these values that we have acquired along the way. And that’s true whether it’s in the arts or the sciences,” the engineer said.
He advises young Latinos that they have to study hard in whatever branch of knowledge they take up, and yet realize at the same time that the world will go on with or without us because “we are just passing through.”
“May we continue this process of improving the world that past generations have left us,” he said.
