Spaced Out: This 30-Year-Old Helps Ethiopian Students Reach For The Stars

Original Story Published by: Tafline Laylin for OZY

Beza Tasfaye is leading efforts to put her country’s space science program on the map.

Beza Tesfaye has been eyeing the stars since she was 6 years old, her curiosity sparked by a book about UFOs. And the youngest of 11 children from a poor family in Addis Ababa refused to let her circumstances — or being schooled within a restrictive national education system — keep her grounded.

Workers install a dome at the Entoto Observatory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on October 24, 2013. The observatory, located 3,200 meters above sea level, will boast two telescopes, each one over three feet wide, to see planets, stars and other galaxies. Photo © Jenny Vaughan/AFP/Getty

Now she’s the general manager of the Ethiopian Space Science Society (ESSS), where she coordinates educational programming for more than 20 branches and 100 schools across the world’s most populous landlocked country. Tesfaye’s goal is to push a nation known mostly for poverty and war into the stratosphere, but it’s not easy. “She’s very humble, polite and energetic,” says Tulu Besha Bedada, an ESSS board member and head of the Earth observation division of the Entoto Observatory and Research Center. “She’ll never give up.”