ASTRONAUT JOSE HERNANDEZ
“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged
bird
That cannot fly.”
(Langston
Hughes)
In August 2009, a few
weeks after turning 47, Jose Hernandez stepped into the space shuttle. He sat
down, buckled in, and braced himself for takeoff. Just before midnight, he
heard the countdown and watched the engines light up. Eight and a half minutes after
blasting into the sky the engines were shut off. Jose couldn’t believe his
eyes. To convince himself it was real, he tossed a piece of equipment up.
Watching it hover, he marveled, “I guess we are in space!!” Over the course of
two weeks in space, he flew over five million miles. It was a short hop
compared to the distance he had travelled for the chance to wear a spacesuit.
Jose had gone from
picking strawberries in fields to floating among stars.
Jose Hernandez had
been raised in poverty by undocumented immigrants. To make ends meet, the
entire family took a long road trip from central Mexico to Northern California
each winter. They stopped at farms along the way to pick everything from
Strawberries and Grapes to Tomatoes and cucumbers. Come fall, they headed back
down to Mexico for a few months. The journey forced Jose to miss several months
of School and scrape by during the rest of the year in three different
districts. After José started his second grade, his father began cobbling
together day jobs so that they could stay in one place. But José still had to
work weekends in the fields to help and support his family. That left him with
limited time for homework and he couldn’t rely on his parents for assistance.
They had third grade education only.
Many kids go
through an astronaut phase. Jose was no exception. On a historic evening in
1972, ten year old Jose Hernandez was mesmerized by the moon walk of the last
Apollo astronauts. He watched them, on the TV, bounding across the surface of
the moon. Jose hoped that one day, he would etch his own footsteps on the moon.
He, however, was committed to making his dream a reality.
As his strongest
subjects were math and science, he felt engineering would be his ride to space.
Over the two subsequent decades, he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in
electrical engineering. The qualification landed him a job as an engineer at a
federal research facility.
No one was aware what
Jose had been through. As mentioned earlier, he was raised in a family of
migrant workers. When he started kindergarten in California, he didn’t speak
English. He finally became fluent in English only at the age of twelve. When he
applied for jobs after his master’s degree in engineering, the application
forms did not ask for unconventional skills like picking grapes. It didn’t
signal that gaining command over English language would qualify as
an honor. The awards section wasn’t a place to mention passing Physics while
working in the fields.
The system wasn’t
designed to identify and weigh the adversity, the candidates had overcoe in
life.
Jose’s academic
performance had been lackluster. In College he had Cs in Chemistry, calculus
and programming in the first semester No one would ever know why his grades
had suffered or why they had improved as time progressed.
To afford tuition,
Jose had worked the graveyard shift at a fruit and vegetable cannery arriving
at 10.00pm and finishing at 6.00am.It was a strain to stay alert in the class,
let alone master the topics.
When the fruit
season ended, he worked nights and weekends as a restaurant busboy. He
completed his first semester with a C average, between demanding classes and a
grueling schedule.
Things started improving
as Jose found work with more reasonable hours. He could organize a more
sustainable routine. It helped him take the initiative to seek tutoring to fill
gaps in his sphere of knowledge. The outcome was, he earned many ‘A’s that had helped
him graduate with cum laude honors. The excellent performance won him a full
scholarship to a master’s programme in engineering at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.
Jose accepted with glee
the offer of a job at the federal research facility, on successful completion
of his master’s degree in electrical engineering.
In 1989, he
submitted the astronaut application. NASA rejected it. But he didn’t give up
hope. He applied again and again, revising his resume, highlighting his
strengths and updating his references. However, he met with rejection after
rejection.
The last rejection
in 1996 broke his spirit. He had the sinking feeling he would never be enough
for NASA. He was on the verge of quitting. But his wife Adela, encouraged him
to go on. She told him he should not throw away his dream.
“Let NASA be the
one to disqualify you,” she urged, “Don’t disqualify yourself.”
In 1998, when Jose was
36, he submitted another astronaut application. Prior to that, he had taken a
year to earn his pilot’s licence. In addition to that, he spent another year to
acquire basic, advanced and master certifications in scuba diving. In between
all these efforts, he had learned to speak Russian.
NASA, at last had
responded to his application, inviting him to attend an interview. When the
interviewer gave him an hour to talk about his background, Jose for once had
opened up. He revealed he had started out as a migrant farmer. He narrated how
he had come up.
The observation of
the interviewer was, “If Jose could accomplish all that by coming from
someplace like he did, to overcome all that and get to the same place other
people reached, then he had a lot of desire and capability.”
Jose was partially
successful with the astronaut application in 1998. NASA had offered him a job
as an engineer, not as an astronaut. He was happy he could be part of the
mission to send humans to space, though he might not be going up.
After a number of years
working as a NASA engineer, in 2004, his phone rang. He was asked whether he
was replaceable. He replied he would be happy to train someone to take his
place.
“Good,” the caller
said, “How would you like to come and work for the astronaut’s office?”
After 15 years of
applying, Jose was selected to go to space.
“The second I
heard the good news,” he recalls, “My whole body went numb.”
He raced to his
house to break the news to his wife, children and parents who celebrated by
hugging and dancing.
“Success is to be
measured not so much by the position that one had reached in life
As by the obstacles
……..overcome while trying to succeed. (Booker
T Washington)
In August 2009, a
few weeks after turning 47, Jose Hernandez stepped into the space shuttle. He
sat down, buckled in, and braced himself for takeoff. Just before midnight, he
heard the countdown and watched the engines light up. Eight and half minutes
after blasting into the sky the engines were shut off. Jose couldn’t believe
his eyes. To convince himself it was real, he tossed a piece of equipment up.
Watching it hover, he marveled, “I guess we are in space!!” Over the course of two
weeks in space, he flew over five million miles. It was a short hop compared to
the distance he had travelled for the chance to wear a spacesuit.
Jose had gone from
picking strawberries in fields to floating among stars.
Hidden Potential
Adam Grant
.
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