José Hernández, former NASA flight engineer, recently sat down with People magazine to open up about how he became the first migrant farm worker to travel to space. The 61-year-old now-retired astronaut was rejected by NASA 11 times before finally being accepted into the space program on his 12th try. “Imagine a 10-year-old kid living in one of the worst parts of Stockton, California, watching an old vacuum-tube technology console TV with the rabbit-ear antenna and grandma's mandatory knitting on the bottom,” he shared.
“There’s me kneeling by that black-and-white TV. And there's Gene Cernan, walking on the moon,” he recalls of the evening in 1972. “I said, ‘That's what I want to be.’”
José shared the recipe for success that his father instilled in him in 1972. “He did two important things that evening: he empowered me to believe I can do it … and he sat me down and he made me justify why," he explained. He went on to share that his father's five ingredients in his recipe for success were “determine your goal, recognize how far you are from it, draw yourself a roadmap, prepare yourself for the challenge, and work, work, work.”
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A biopic of the former astronaut, starring Michael Peña as José, is now in theaters and streaming on Amazon Prime. A Million Miles Away is based on the true story of his journey to becoming a NASA flight engineer on the 2009 Space Shuttle mission STS-128.
