What It Actually Means... To Offer A Land Of Purely... Unlimited Opportunity: NASA Mars Edition.

She spoke no English, worked odd jobs, and did house-keeping, at hotels. Put herself through college. She came to America with $300 in her pocket, from Columbia -- at 17, with a dream.

And an ample helping of natural scientific ability, coupled with. . . determination. She's a NASA Mars Flight Director now. She's one of the people we most prize, as emblematic of the immortal Lazarus poem. Here's a bit, from Yahoo News:

. . .When NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars last week, aerospace engineer Diana Trujillo, who is a flight director on the mission, said in an interview with CBS News that it took her some time to process that it had arrived on the red planet.

"I was very much on the mindset of 'What's happening?'" she said. Then as pictures and videos from Perseverance started to beam back, it became real.

"Are we safe? I think that watching the image was when I actually processed that we had actually landed," she added. . . .

Her dreams of reaching space and wanting to understand the universe came as a young person in Cali, Colombia. Her parents were divorcing and as a 17-year-old, she decided to go to the United States, arriving with only $300 and not speaking any English. She worked housekeeping jobs to pay for her studies and later joined NASA in 2007. . . .

This is America's future. That speech at CPAC this afternoon: nearly the ugliest past. Period.

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