News Item: Venezuelan engineer heads major NASA laboratory

Miami, Feb 4 (EFE).- Carlos Tomas Mata is a Venezuelan engineer who came to Florida 10 years ago to study English and is now a NASA lab chief and contemplating another step toward realizing a dream he has had since childhood: becoming an astronaut.

Now chief of the Advanced Data Acquisition System at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Mata did not realize the importance of the job he was doing until two months into working at the center.

"I graduated on a Saturday and took a plane on Sunday to start work on Monday. It was only later that I realized that I was part of no less that the U.S. space program," Mata said in an interview with EFE.

The year was 2000, and Mata was finishing up his Ph.D. on potentials, electromagnetics and atmospheric scales at the University of Florida when he got a call from the Kennedy Space Center to apply for a job a the laboratory he now heads."

A few months earlier, I had visited the center and took the opportunity to ask about working there and dropped off my papers. To my surprise, a few weeks later they called me for an interview," he said."

Afterward, they asked me when I would be available to start.

They needed me in December, and it was precisely in December that I would be graduating. So I packed my bags still wracked by a headache from the graduation party," he added.

A 1993 graduate of Simon Bolivar University, the most prestigious of Venezuela's public scientific universities, with a degree in electrical engineering, Mata went to western Florida in 1995 to study English, not as an immigrant, because his professional situation in Caracas was stable. "I was doing well. I couldn't complain," he said.

But during his stay, Venezuela changed governments, and early in President Rafael Caldera's term, a banking crisis, the worst in Venezuelan history, made him decide to go for a master's degree and then a doctorate.

It wasn't easy. But Mata succeeded in getting admitted, with some financial aid, to the University of Florida, from where he moved directly into the space program.Four years later, at the age of 35, he heads the laboratory where he got started.

There's where the sensors and other instruments the spaceships need at the launching pad are designed. But, even though he has achieved a position that would be envied by any scientist, Mata has gone back to a childhood dream.

"I dreamed of being an astronaut, but it was a dream I abandoned as I grew up, because I understood that, living in Venezuela, it would only lead to frustration," he said.

Nevertheless, given the turns his life has taken, for a few months he has been thinking of applying to an astronaut training program to which he has a good chance of being admitted.

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