In 2001, José Hernández left Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for NASA... but not as an astronaut. Hernández joined the team at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he worked in the materials and processes department. He was finally accepted into the Astronaut Candidate program three years later, in 2004. Even so, his dream wasn't a foregone conclusion. From 2004 to 2006, Hernández underwent rigorous scientific study and survival training sessions during which he was pushed to his limits mentally and physically. Just as his father had warned him about in the fifth step of his recipe, the real challenge began once he'd reached his goal.
Eventually, he was assigned to Florida's Kennedy Space Center where he helped prepare for shuttle launches and landings. Then, in 2009, he got the chance to do the very thing he'd been imagining ever since he was a kid watching the Apollo 17 mission on his family's antennae TV (via Visit Stockton). Hernández received an offer to be a mission specialist on STS-128, a 14-day trip into outer space. From August 28 to September 11 of that year, on the 128th shuttle mission and the 30th to the International Space Station, Hernández logged 217 orbits of the Earth over 5.7 million miles. "You go from zero to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half minutes," Hernández told PEOPLE, comparing it to an amusement park ride. It's an experience that only about 500 people out of 7 billion have ever had, and it's one that he found humbling.
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