Welcome Ceremony for José Hernández Moreno, NASA Astronaut in México

Earlier today, President Felipe Calderón led the welcome ceremony for NASA astronaut José Hernández, at the official Los Pinos residence.

José Hernández Moreno, born in French Camp, California on August 7 1962, is an expert on NASA special missions. His parents Julia Moreno and Salvador Hernández, Mexican immigrants from La Piedad, Michoacán, arrived in the United States sixty years ago to work in the crop fields of California.

José Hernández studied electrical engineering at Pacific University and subsequently pursued an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of California in Santa Bárbara. He was chosen by NASA for the 19th Group in 2004 for spatial activities.

In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Pacific University.

He was encouraged to become an astronaut when he was picking vegetables in Stockton, California and heard on the transistor radio that a Latin American of Costa Rica origin, Franklin Chang-Díaz had been chosen for the NASA astronauts’ program and would be the first Latino in space. His collaboration with the Livermore National Laboratory in the 1990s contributed to the development of a new tool for the early detection of breast cancer.

The NASA engineer remembers exactly how this happened, “I was using a large hoe to clear a row of sugar better in a field near Stockton, California when I heard on the transistor radio that Franklin Chang-Díaz had been selected as an astronaut,” says Hernández, who was a high-school student at the time. Hernández says that he recalls when Hispanic-American Franklin Chang-Díaz was chosen: That was when I said, “I want to travel to space,” and since then, this is something I have fought to achieve every day.

As one of four children of a family of Mexican farm migrants, Hernández did not learn English until he was 12. He spent most of his children in what he calls the California Circuit, traveling with his family from Mexico to southern California every March and working in Stockton until November, harvesting strawberries and cucumbers at the farms on the route.”

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