ep. 16 - Jose Hernandez: Retired Astronaut, Business Man, & Author
NASA engineer José Hernández is one of four children born into a migrant farming family from Mexico and spent much of his childhood on what he calls "the California circuit" - traveling from Mexico to northern California each March, picking fruits and vegetables at farms along the route before returning to Mexico for Christmas.
After graduating high school in Stockton, Hernandez 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 U.C. Santa Barbara. In 1987, he accepted a full-time job with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he had worked as a co-op in college. During his time there, Hernandez worked on signal and image processing applications in radar imaging, computed tomography, and acoustic imaging. He was selected to begin training as a mission specialist as part of the 2004 astronaut candidate class.
