First Mexican American astronaut talks to AU students about reaching for the stars

José M. Hernández, dressed in a blue NASA flight suit, ignores the podium on the stage of Aurora University's Tapper Hall and instead sits down on the steps facing the first row of seats. He moves seamlessly between English and Spanish as he tells students about his journey from migrant farmworker picking fruit in California to becoming the first Mexican American astronaut.

“I was 10 years old and watching on our black-and-white TV as astronaut Gene Cernan walked on the moon as part of Apollo 17. I said, ‘That’s what I want to be. I want to be just like him.’ I was too naive to realize how big of a challenge it was,” Hernández said.

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, Hernández worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for 14 years. While there, he applied a dozen times to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s astronaut program before getting accepted at age 42. In 2009, he flew his first mission to the International Space Station on the space shuttle Discovery.

He had reached the stars, and the view was “life-changing,” he said.

“When I first unbuckled my seat belt and went to the window, what struck me was that I couldn’t tell where one country ended and another began,” he said. “I had to go out of this world to realize that borders are human-made concepts designed to separate us.”

Hernández met with students before giving a public lecture to a sold-out crowd at Crimi Auditorium as part of Aurora University’s Celebrating Arts and Ideas series earlier this month. Hernández, 62, is now a motivational speaker and runs his own aerospace consulting firm. His book “Reaching for the Stars: The Inspiring Story of a Migrant Farmworker Turned Astronaut” (2012) was adapted into an Amazon Prime original movie, “A Million Miles Away” (2023).

One of the most important lessons, he said, is hard work and perseverance. Whenever NASA rejected his application, he worked to improve it and tried again.

“I took flying lessons because NASA was selecting mostly pilots,” he said. “I became scuba dive-certified. I accepted a job that no one wanted, working in a nuclear nonproliferation arena in Russia, because I saw NASA would be working with the Russians. I was pretty strategic in doing things that got me closer and closer each time. There were a lot of ‘no’s’ before I finally got to the ‘yes’.”

To learn about upcoming speakers and events, visit auartsandideas.com.