Rodolfo Neri Vela
Rodolfo Neri Vela, born February 19, 1952, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Mexico, is a Mexican engineer and astronaut. He became the second Latin American to travel to space, after Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez. He studied at UNAM (bachelor’s in mechanical and electrical engineering, 1975), the University of Essex (master’s in telecommunications, 1976), and the University of Birmingham (PhD in electromagnetic radiation, 1979).
As a professional, Neri Vela worked as an engineer and professor, and he is a researcher in the Electrical Engineering department at UNAM. In 1985, he flew aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-61-B as a Payload Specialist. The mission deployed several satellites, included two six-hour spacewalks to study space station construction, and conducted various experiments, including Mexican payload experiments. He traveled about 2.4 million miles (3.8 million kilometers), completed 108 orbits, and logged more than 165 hours in space.
An interesting note from the flight: he requested tortillas for his food supply, and NASA later began including tortillas on shuttle and ISS missions because they don’t crumble like bread and can be used in sandwiches. Neri Vela has a mixed heritage of Native American, Spanish, and Italian. In 2016, he contributed to the Latin American dubbing of Finding Dory as the narrator for the Institute of Marine Life.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 02:43 (CET).