Jose Hernandez

José M. Hernández is a former NASA astronaut, engineer, and migrant farmworker’s son who speaks on perseverance, goal-setting, and STEM achievement for corporate, education, and civic audiences.

Born in French Camp, California, to a family of Mexican migrant farmworkers, José didn’t learn English until age 12 and spent his childhood moving between fields in California and his family’s hometown in Michoacán, Mexico. He earned degrees in electrical engineering from the University of the Pacific and UC Santa Barbara, then spent more than 15 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he helped develop a space-deployed X-ray laser and co-developed the first full-field digital mammography system for earlier breast cancer detection – work recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy. He later managed U.S.-Russian nuclear nonproliferation programs at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C.

José applied to NASA’s astronaut program 11 times before being selected in 2004. He trained for three years and, in 2009, flew as flight engineer on Space Shuttle Discovery’s 14-day STS-128 mission to the International Space Station, where he also operated the robotic arm and became the first person to tweet in Spanish from space. Before his flight, he served as Branch Chief of Materials and Processes at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and helped investigate the root cause of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident.

After leaving NASA in 2011, José ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in California, founded Tierra Luna Engineering, an aerospace and STEM consulting firm, and was appointed a Regent of the University of California. His memoir, Reaching for the Stars: The Inspiring Story of a Migrant Farmworker Turned Astronaut, inspired the 2023 Amazon Studios film A Million Miles Away, starring Michael Peña.

José speaks regularly to corporations, universities, and school districts on turning setbacks into fuel for achieving audacious goals, drawing directly on being rejected by NASA eleven times before finally reaching space. His audiences have included Google, Boeing, Whole Foods, Univision, and the Council of the Great City Schools.

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