Jose Hernandez from Field Worker to Astronaut

The shuttle Discovery is scheduled to lift off early Tuesday morning 1:36 am from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Hernandez will be part of a crew of seven comprised of six men and one woman. The mission’s main objectives are to deliver supplies to the space station and to replace Tim Kopra with Nicole Stott.

Hollywood writers could not write a better story line than the one Hernandez has lived. Hernandez spent his childhood years working his summer vacations with his family in various California farm fields picking vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers and sugar beets. His parents were Mexican migrant workers and every year the family would drive two days in March from the Mexican state of Michoacan to California and begin working the farm fields. They would work the fields seven days a week till November when they would return to Mexico for the Hernandez and his siblings to attend school.

School was important to the Hernandez family. His parents only had a third grade education. Even though Hernandez did not learn how to speak English till he was 12 years old, he and his three siblings all graduated from high school and attended college.

Hernandez went on to receive his BS and Masters in Electrical Engineering by 1987. He joined NASA in 2001 working first at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. In May of 2004, Hernandez began his astronaut training and completed his Astronaut Candidate Training in February 2006.

The dream to become an astronaut first started when Hernandez was a young boy. He would hold the rabbit ears to the family television to be able to watch the Apollo Moon landing. It was sparked again when he when he learned about another Hispanic astronaut.

"I was hoeing a row of sugar beets in a field near Stockton, Calif., and I heard on my transistor radio that Franklin Chang-Diaz had been selected for the Astronaut Corps," stated Hernandez on his foundation website, who was a senior in high school at the time. Learning about how Chang-Diaz had worked his way from his poor beginnings was all the inspiration Hernandez needed to become an astronaut himself.

Hernandez will be busy during his thirteen day mission in space. In between his duties of helping his crewmates suit up for their spacewalks, performing robotic operations, transferring the supplies from the shuttle to the space station and inspecting shuttle Discovery after the launch for any damage; Hernandez will be tweeting from space in two languages. He can be followed on twitter by searching for Astro_Jose.

While Hernandez is not the first Hispanic astronaut to go into space; his trip on Discovery will be the first time that two Hispanic have flown into space on the same flight. Fellow crewmate, Danny Olivas is also a Mexican-American.

Early Tuesday morning when the shuttle is launched, Hernandez will fulfill the dream of to go the outer space a little boy had while working under the hot summer sun many years ago. Who knows what future astronaut will be dreaming that same dream when they look up towards the sky thinking of Hernandez and the rest of Discovery’s crew being up there among the stars.