Amazon Prime Debuts Biopic on APB Speaker and Astronaut José Hernández
11 Oct 2023
A biopic about APB speaker and NASA Astronaut and Engineer José Hernández recently premiered on Amazon Prime. A Million Miles Away stars Michael Peña and tells the story of Hernández’s life from a child migrant worker to achieving his dream of becoming an astronaut and traveling to space. It’s based on Hernández’s autobiography, Reaching for the Stars.
One of four children in a migrant farming family from Mexico, Hernández—who didn't learn English until he was 12 years old—spent much of his childhood on what he calls "the California circuit," traveling with his family from Mexico to Southern California each March, then working northward to the Stockton area by November, picking strawberries and cucumbers at farms along the route. Then they would return to Mexico for Christmas and start the cycle all over again come spring.
"Some kids might think it would be fun to travel like that," Hernández says. "But we had to work. It wasn't a vacation."
After graduating high school in Stockton, Hernández enrolled at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering and was awarded a full scholarship to the graduate program at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he continued his engineering studies. In 1987, he accepted a full-time job with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he had worked as a co-op in college.
While at Lawrence Livermore, Hernández worked on signal and image processing applications in radar imaging, computed tomography, and acoustic imaging. Later in his career, Hernández worked on developing quantitative X-ray film imaging analysis techniques for the X-ray laser program. Hernández applied these techniques in the medical physics arena and co-developed the first full-field digital mammography imaging system. This system has proven useful for detecting breast cancer at an earlier stage than present film/screen mammography techniques.
Hernández has won recognition awards for his work on this project. He has also worked in the international arena where he represented Lawrence Livermore and the U.S. Department of Energy on Russian nuclear non-proliferation issues.
In 2004, he was selected for NASA’s astronaut class after his application had previously been rejected 11 times. In 2009, he joined the crew of the space shuttle Discovery as Mission Specialist 2. The shuttle traveled to the International Space Station.