- Jose Hernandez
- Astronaut
Johnson Space Center
Unlike people who are born in the same country as their parents, I showed up in a different country than that of my parents. Thus began my interesting life and journey to the stars. Like many other people from their village in central Mexico, my parents would make the annual trek to the United States each spring to find work on the farms. In the fall we would make the two day drive and return to Mexico.
This type of lifestyle made it difficult for me to learn English. One year as we prepared to go back to Mexico, my second grade school teacher visited my parents and convinced them to settle in a place where the kids could go to school year round. From that moment Stockton, California became our home. Visits to Mexico became much shorter and less frequent.
Happy to be able to call northern California my home, I was now able to dream about reaching for the stars. I clearly recall the moment in my young life that helped me realize that perhaps my dream of traveling to the stars could one day come true.
Shortly after settling down in northern California and towards the end of NASA’s Apollo lunar space program, I saw my first images of astronauts walking on the moon on our small black and white television. This allowed my imagination to run wild and that night was the first of many nights that I would dream of someday visiting the moon.
Wanting to be an astronaut and actually becoming one were two very different things and I soon realized that reaching my dream would require a lot of hard work and a good education. Nevertheless, I felt up to the challenge and plowed ahead and used this as motivation to go to college and earn my degrees in electrical engineering and signals and systems.
After graduate school, I started working as an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is here where I started working on the development of a space deployable x-ray laser. Shortly thereafter I started applying to NASA’s astronaut program. At first all I would receive was a simple form letter thanking me for applying to the astronaut program. Matter of fact, it was not until after six years that I received my first interview. By this time I was working with the Russians in the disposition of their excess nuclear materials in accordance to U.S. and Russian agreements. Three interviews later and twelve years after first applying I was finally selected to the 19th class of astronauts in 2004.
Today, I train and work with other U.S. astronauts at the NASA-Johnson Space Center facility in Houston, Texas. While training and waiting for my turn to reach for the stars, I work on a variety of projects that include the development of various repair techniques for the Space Shuttle’s thermal protection system. I also help prepare the Shuttle on each of its missions by performing a variety of pre-launch systems tests and configuring the cockpit for launch.
I am very excited to be a part of the NEEMO XII crew! I think this mission will be very similar to a real space mission in that we will be working in an underwater laboratory and conducting experiments for scientists all over the country. I am very much looking forward to becoming a “resident” of the incredibly beautiful coral reef that is the home to Aquarius.
