08/06/2026
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HE PICKED CROPS UNTIL HE WAS 12. THEN HE SPENT 13 DAYS IN SPACE.
He was working a row of sugar beets in a field outside Stockton, California, listening to a small transistor radio.
The news came through that NASA had selected Franklin Chang-Díaz for the astronaut corps. José Hernández was a high school senior with dirt on his hands. And standing in that field, he decided he would be next.
It would take him another 24 years and eleven rejection letters.
🌾 A CHILDHOOD MEASURED IN HARVESTS
José Moreno Hernández was born on August 7, 1962, in French Camp, California. His family came from La Piedad, Michoacán.
He was one of four children in a migrant family. Each March they traveled north through California, working farms as they went, then returned to Mexico for Christmas to begin the cycle again.
He has been careful to correct anyone who romanticizes it. Some children might imagine that kind of travel is fun, he has written, but it was work — not a vacation.
Three moves a year meant three schools a year. He did not learn English until he was 12 years old.
Two people changed the trajectory.
The first was his second-grade teacher, who persuaded his parents to stay in one place so their children could have stability.
The second was his father. José was 10 years old, watching Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walk on the moon on television, when he announced he was going to be an astronaut.
His father did not laugh.
"My father validated my dream and then told me to recognize how far I was from my goal, create a road map, get an education and use the strong work ethic I developed from being a farmworker," Hernández said. "So that's what I did."
📐 THE ROAD MAP
He graduated from high school in Stockton, earned an electrical engineering degree at the University of the Pacific, then went to the University of California, Santa Barbara on a full graduate scholarship. He finished his master's degree in 1986.
In 1987 he took a full-time position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he had worked as a co-op student. He spent years on signal and image processing — radar imaging, computed tomography, acoustic imaging — and later developed X-ray imaging analysis techniques for the X-ray laser program.
Then the X-ray laser program was cancelled.
"Adversity creates opportunity," he says. He found another use for the tools he had built — and co-developed the first full-field digital mammography imaging system, technology that lets doctors detect breast cancer at a far earlier stage.
Remember that. We will come back to it.
✉️ ELEVEN LETTERS
He joined NASA's Johnson Space Center in 2001. He applied for the astronaut corps. NASA turned him down eleven times.
Roughly 12,000 people apply in each cycle. After the rejections kept coming, he studied the résumés of the astronauts who did get in and noticed they were pilots and scuba divers. So he earned a pilot's license and a scuba certification. He also learned Russian.
After the sixth rejection he was ready to stop. His wife, Adelita, would not let him. She reminded him the letter itself said to apply again next cycle, and told him that if he quit he would spend the rest of his life wondering "what if." She told him, simply, don't quit.
He applied a twelfth time and was accepted in 2004, at the age of 42.
In August 2009 he flew as a mission specialist and flight engineer aboard Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-128 — the 30th mission to the International Space Station. The crew spent 14 days in orbit, circled the Earth 217 times, performed three spacewalks and delivered 18,000 pounds of supplies.
He also became the first astronaut to send a message in Spanish from space.
Somewhere below him, on one of those 217 passes, were the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.
❤️ WHAT HE IS PROUDEST OF
People assume the answer is the launch. It isn't.
"People expect me to say that going to space was my proudest professional moment. It wasn't," he says. "It was inventing that mammography device, because it has saved thousands of lives."
A boy from a migrant family who did not speak English at twelve helped build a machine that finds cancer early enough to beat it.
🇲🇽 WHAT HE DOES NOW
He retired from NASA in 2011 and now serves as a Regent of the University of California. He spends much of his time speaking to students — and he talks openly about something a lot of successful people hide.
"Imposter syndrome happens at all levels," he tells them. "Focus on your past accomplishments. Convince yourself that you belong."
Through his Reaching For The Stars Foundation, he puts it this way: the point is to plant seeds of inspiration so that children can harvest success.
Farmworker language. He never stopped using it.
His life became the 2023 film A Million Miles Away. But the real story is simpler than any movie: a father who took a ten-year-old seriously, a teacher who asked a family to stay, a wife who said don't quit, and a man who kept a promise he made to himself in a beet field.
Somebody in almost every Mexican and Mexican-American family has worked a harvest. Whose hands built your family's road map? We'd like to read about them below.
