this is jocko podcast number 310 with carrie helton and me jocko willink good evening kerry good evening i went back to the living room and sat down on the couch newspaper clippings letters of recognition and photos with important individuals were scattered across my coffee table the 47 years of my life were summarized in a pile of images and words my life story stared me in the face one photograph in particular caught my attention it was one in which i was holding a single tomato in one hand and a bucket full of tomatoes in the other i was wearing an old blue t-shirt and a pair of shoes that were ripped my abuelo jose and my siblings stood beside me my abuelo posed with his straw hat we were all wearing old dirty clothes the agricultural field seemed infinite in the background the color of the shirt i was wearing in the photo was the exact color of the shirt i was wearing as i gazed at the picture at that moment i had to smile thinking about how things in life came full circle i was now wearing a blue nasa polo shirt and not an old blue t-shirt it dawned on me that there is no secret formula or magic for making dreams come true the only way to make a dream come true is to have the passion the work ethic and the foundation of a good education to help go from one step to the next while pushing aside the obstacles in life and that right there is an excerpt from a book the book is called reaching for the stars it was written by a gentleman by the name of jose hernandez who has had an incredible voyage that led him from those fields picking tomatoes as a child out in central california and doing that to help pay the bills for his family and that journey took him all the way to man’s final frontier space aboard the space shuttle as an astronaut and it is an honor to have jose with us here tonight to share his story with us and also share some of the lessons that he learned along the way it’s a great honor jose thank you for joining us thank you for inviting me a pleasure to be here it’s a it’s a wild story and i kind of jumped to the end there yes that the the voyage that you’ve been on the whole way and the perseverance that you’ve shown um just an incredible story yes i think it just epitomizes the um the american story you know of what’s possible here in this great country of ours of being able to uh reach the american dream uh if you’re willing to work for it you know i always tell folks when i give my talks i say look i’m a religious man i’m a catholic man but i also know nothing’s going to fall from the sky for me anything i want in this world of ours you gotta work for it and and and i my father taught me that at a very young age and you saw that fact that working with my grandfather in the fields picking tomatoes i mean they taught us that work ethic and they said nothing’s going to come for free in this world and i certainly believed it and i just developed a great work ethic as a result incredible um well you know if we’re going to go through the story we might as well go through the story again the book is called reaching for the stars and and as i read this story look folks i can’t read them i’m not gonna read the whole book that’s not what we’re here for but you gotta get the book to get all the details the level of detail that you give is incredible it’s a it’s a there’s funny parts of the book there’s sad parts in the book there’s triumphant parts in the book and there’s failure in the book so it covers the full spectrum of human emotions and so if you if you want to hear the full story you gotta get the book again it’s called reaching for the stars um so i’m gonna jump ahead a little bit here we go i was born august 7th 1962 in french camp california at that time my family lived in stockton california that is where the story of my life begins i grew up surrounded by the love of my family and the many hardships that come along with being part of a migrant family my memory begins at the age of five precisely as i s the time i started school i remember boarding this bus to school when we were living out in the countryside near the city of modesto the school located in the small town of salida am i saying that right salida salida seemed very large and was filled with students who seemed a lot bigger and older than me the classrooms were decorated and filled with rows of shiny new desks the desks had built-in compartments that allowed us to store pencils crayons and papers i could not believe i was assigned my own beautiful desk phrases of gratitude were silently running through my head but all i could do was stare at the blackboard because i did not speak the language i tried to figure out the meaning of what was written down and drawn in colored chalk i never dared to raise my hand to ask a question let alone answer one i also never fully participated in any of the classroom kindergarten activities like singing storytelling or playing board games it came as no surprise that my kindergarten teacher whom i called la mastra spoke only english she was not sure i understood everything that was being taught much less being said i remained silent with the hope of being invisible to everyone so that’s what it kicks off going into school no english zero yes and and the teachers they’re just teaching in english and that’s that exactly deal with it in in in those days there weren’t any programs like english as a second language where they put you and they try to uh beef up your english skills they just threw you in the general population and uh you sank or swam you know and then and that’s the way it was and you know if there’s uh proponents that say that’s the way it should be and there’s others that say no we need an english a second language a as a program to help the weaker students uh and so but in that particular case i had no choice i was just thrown in there what do you think what’s the way to do it just straight immersion what’s your opinion when i went to college i took spanish yeah i took three semesters of spanish and i had a friend that’s mexican that i took spanish with and he grew up speaking spanish i got better grades than him in spanish class and i couldn’t i would i got done i could barely you know i’d go to a mexican restaurant i couldn’t i was worthless i was worthless at speaking but i learned like the rules yes exactly yeah but i remember sometimes the teachers they had the thought the professors had the thought that you this is immersion and so they would they wouldn’t speak to you in any in any english at all and i thought to myself sometimes i thought to myself i really wish i you would answer this question for me because i don’t know i’m not figuring this out i don’t know what do you think i think it should be a hybrid because i think there’s students that will do well under an immersion program and then there’s other students that really need that extra help so that they can get to that next level and i’ll tell you you know my first experience in kindergarten was um uh was just as you described it there but it actually occurred in three different places because um you know my story begins well before i was even born my parents are from the central state of mitrakhan in mexico and my father at the young age of 15 out of economic necessity was comes from a family of 12 he’s one of the oldest boys he had to come and work in california as uh in in in in what he knew which was agriculture and he quickly set up a routine which was common amongst those folks from michoacan which was you would spend two months in southern california ontario chino area picking strawberries then two and then you will move up to salinas and you pick strawberries and lettuce and then you will go up to the stockton modesto area for five months there you start off with the cucumbers then the cherries then uh then you got onions and peaches and uh you and and tomatoes and then you end the harvest with the grape harvest and then he would go back home for three months and cool his heels well when he was 19 he met my mother from the same hometown they got married and she was the uh at the old ripe age of 14 you know which would have been a crime these days now right but uh but but they they got married and luckily my dad uh incorporate my mom into this nomadic lifestyle and of course kids come along uh during the marriage right and there’s four of us i’m the youngest of four and where you were born dictated on what month you were born in see i was born in august okay so you were an american the last stop yes the last stop i was uh and my brother was born in september then i got a brother and sister born in december and they were born in mexico well getting back to now imagine we were living this nomadic lifestyle as a kid and spanish is the only uh language i knew how to speak right now imagine the kindergarten my first kindergarten is going to um in the ontario chino area you know i they they stick me in there just as i learn where the bathroom’s at they take me to salinas and just learn where those bathrooms are at i’m down to my third kindergarten teacher in stockton and uh and so you can imagine it wasn’t a very conducive environment to uh to learn and that’s that’s eventually why your dad decided to stay up in america right yes yes as a matter of fact um in the second um and remind me to to say some about my teacher at the end when we blast off and all that because i always forget to tell that part of the story which is which is pretty cool but but but uh it wasn’t until i was in the second grade in the second grade we were in our last stop in stockton and my dad gets up in the morning about a week a week before um a week before we go to mexico he makes the what we call the grana nunzio the big announcement and the big announcement was he would get up and say kids we’re going to mexico next week talk to your teachers and get three months worth of homework why three months because that’s what we stayed over there and my father my parents didn’t put us in school over there because uh uh christmas vacation came along and they said no no no no you guys are going to self-study and so my mom would wake us up every morning in my grandma’s house uh we would go to the kitchen they would give us a cup of hot chocolate piece of french bread and from eight in the morning to 12 all four of us will be doing our homework you know the homework was stained of chocolate but we got it done and uh and and so in the second grade when he told us to do that to get the homework i went to my second grade teacher miss young and uh man she was a you know second grade who’s your first crush you know yeah guilty as charge you know in my mind it was me and miss young you know and and and and i remember um she was tall young uh asian and black long black hair and tall relatively to a second grader because now i see her the poor thing is short but she was tall back then and um and i asked her for for for the uh for my homework and she looked at me with this frustrated look and said you tell your parents i’m going to come home and talk to them and that’s when miss young came and convinced my parents that we needed to stay in one place and and that’s what sort of changed the whole dynamics the whole direction of our family and i love to tell the story to educators because uh you know i tell them hey i know you feel like you’re not making a difference but let me tell you one little thing my teacher did that changed the trajectory of a whole family and i tell them this nice story about miss young and she actually came to your house to meet your parents yes my mom uh when she when she told me that she was gonna come and talk to him that evening i went running home i didn’t even wait for my siblings because they were in elementary school too i went running home because i you know i felt like paul revere right teachers coming teachers coming you know with the lamps you know and uh and and and i tell my dad and my mom about and my mom of course like any latina woman instead of uh worrying about because my dad first when i told him the teacher was coming he started taking off his belt because he said he must have did something bad and i kind of backtracked and convinced him it had to do with our trip to mexico and my mom’s different priority she actually said we have to sweep and mop and make a nice dinner because the teacher’s coming and so yeah they pulled out all the bells and whistles when the teacher came i loved when visitors came to our house because you know we lived a very humble life i never ever went to bed hungry thanks to my parents hard work but i’ll tell you man we had our fair share of beans and rice and tortillas and salsa but when visitors came the protein magically appeared in the form of a nice thin steak you know chicken or a pork shop and i remember i used to get so happy when my dad would say hey your uncle’s coming or your grandpa’s coming translation we’re going to have meat on the table but but yeah see she actually came and uh and she convinced and she told a beautiful story to my dad to convince him because my dad is a very um what what well how should i put a very uh proud man and um and i remember after dinner they went to the small living room and and um and my dad and ms young thanked my mom for the dinner after she brought coffee and she basically said i didn’t really come here to uh to to have dinner but thank you very much i really came to talk to you about the education process of your four kids and i remember this story because my dad and mom did not speak english at the time miss young didn’t speak spanish so i was the official translator since she was my teacher and and and when she said that that she was here uh to talk about the education process of the four kids my dad immediately got uncomfortable because i know what’s going through my dad’s mind he was saying it’s not a complaint of one kid it’s a complaint of four kids you know and miss young saw how how uncomfortable she he got and she said no it doesn’t it it’s quite the contrary senor it has to do the fact that i’ve had the privilege of having your four kids in my class and let me tell you they all love school they’re good students i said but this nomadic lifestyle that you’re living uh is not helping them and my dad immediately stops miss young says hey wait wait wait wait wait it says it’s it’s true that that uh my wife and i only have a third grade elementary education we’re farm workers and and while my kids help me in the weekends in the fields and seven days a week during the summer whenever there’s school i said they’re either in school or they’re doing their homework they’re self-studying i said we take serious their education and miss young said yes but you moved from to three different towns three different school districts you know what my dad’s response was he said yes we but we move on a saturday which was true we finished school on a friday monday we were in the new town new school district and we were in school so we didn’t miss a day of school he was right about that and and then miss young would say yes but then you go to mexico for three months and my dad says yes but they take your homework so in my dad’s eyes he was meeting his obligation of giving us an education he didn’t realize that moving us around was detrimental to the process the educational process and miss young was clearly frustrated and then i watched her closely and then she kind of smiles almost as she got an idea and you know she must have studied psychology because she she was brilliant at it the first thing she does is is is she caters to my dad’s eagle she looks at mr hernandez and says mr hernandez your kids tell me that you have many years experience in agriculture said man i think you can be considered an expert on agriculture issues oh man you didn’t have to tell that to my dad my dad starts pulling up his collar so oh you know i’m not sure i could be considered an expert but i do know a thing or two about plants can i help you and man miss young lets out a bigger shop she took the he took the debate he took the bait and uh and miss young said well yes as a matter of fact you can she said you know i’m gonna give you a problem and you can tell me what happens because i think that’s gonna help me but i think it’s also gonna help you and my dad says sure what’s the problem she goes and she says imagine i give you a small tree in a potted plant i’m going to give it to you it’s a fruit tree and my dad says well thank you so now i want you to find the best ground fertile ground dig a hole and you plant it and you take good care of it like the expert that you are you’re gonna fertilize it water it everything you take good care of it my dad says i can do that for you miss young absolutely then she looks at him says three months later i want you to find another piece of ground equally as good dig a hole transplant that tree there keep taking care of it my dad puzzled look now says okay and then miss young viral very quickly says and in another three months what’s more every three months i want you to transplant that tree mr hernandez but you’re gonna take good care of it it’s gonna get all the water all the fertilizer all the nutrients it needs because you’re the expert you’re gonna take good care of it then she looks straight in the eye to him and says now you tell me what happens in the long run to that tree oh my dad starts thinking starts combing his mustache like he likes to when he’s very pensive and says well miss young that’s very easy he says the tree’s not gonna die but you’re gonna stunt its growth because it’s going to be weak and if it’s a fruit tree it probably won’t even bear fruit why let me tell you why so a tree needs to be in one place so the roots can grow deep and the branch even raises up his hands the branches can grow big and tall and he’s doing this and you can count to two seconds big and tall and then you can see his facial express he got it i mean he got it took him two seconds but he got it because he sheepishly kind of put his hand down and i gotta get because my dad’s very proud but i gotta give him credit that day because he you know he could have uh got mad or denial whatever but he actually just looked at miss young and said is that what you mean and miss young said that’s exactly what i mean i think my job is done here and she excused herself and she went off and i’ll tell you that year we still went to mexico but on the way back we used to go by car and from stockton to mitrakhan it’s almost a three-day trip on the way back that year we didn’t stop in ontario china we kept driving north we didn’t stop in central california salinas so we kept driving north and we went straight to stockton from then on that was our first and only stop and then our trips back to mexico we still went every year but our trips to mexico shrank from three months to three weeks centered around christmas vacation and all of a sudden our education started to get traction and why why did it happen all because the visit of one teacher and this is why i always loved telling this story to educators i said you just never know what little c you’re gonna plant that’s gonna give fruit and no pun intended in terms of uh helping kids i said so whenever you’re down and out think of this story because i’m sure there’s something you’ve done in your career that’s affected a kid you may not know about it but i’m sure something that you’ve done positive has helped a family yeah no doubt about it that’s uh awesome story i know there’s another thing you mentioned in here that had an impact on you i’m going to the book it says star trek was my favorite show growing up my brother chava had a toy model of the uss enterprise spaceship from the show which was my favorite toy to borrow and play with for hours and hours in stockton we spent a majority of the year while in california we lived in a small rented three-bedroom house located on the east side of town it was an old house made of wood with a tile roof it had a small bathroom a round dining table and a living room with old furniture although the kitchen was small it was always stocked with the necessities for making a delicious mexican meal tortillas tomatoes peppers and onions the cuarto or bedroom i shared with chava and gill had only two beds a desk and a dresser our furniture was rather austere and most of the pieces were secondhand the most luxurious item my family owned was the black and white television set and even that was old by normal standards the street we lived on reflected the humbleness of its residents my family included with a few exceptions my neighbors made a living working either in the fields or the canneries the canneries processed vegetables and fruits brought directly from the fields this is where the tomatoes are packaged after being turned into ketchup or paste and where the fruits are canned to become fruit cocktail i came from a world bordered by limitations primarily financial ones fortunately as a child i occupied myself with something that did not require any de niro because it was free no one knew about my special hobby because i did not talk about it fueled by the scenes of star trek i spent my time looking up at the sky especially at night at the time i did not know exactly what it meant mesmerized me but there was something up in the sky that fascinated me i spent hours in my bedroom gazing through the window and staring up at the stars i stared at the stars thinking those stars over there are twinkling and that one over there is not those over there look yellow while those over there look blue all of them appear to be the same but they all are so different so even from a young age you were you were fascinated by what you were seeing up in space yes and what really helped was the fact that um aside from watching the first run star trek series and william shatner who by the way recently became a real astronaut right he went up into space right that’s right he just did across the carmen line so he uh he became an astronaut got his wings but but um what what really inspired me was uh you know after watching things like star trek uh lost in space and those type of programs um when we used to go out to the fields it used to be in the early dawn it was still dark outside and so we would go out to the fields away from the light pollution and so you’re in pitch dark still the sun hasn’t come up and still needs 20 30 minutes for it to come up i would go outside and you would go up and you let your eyes adapt and you stargaze and you can see the stars so clearly you know and you know even clouds you know like the milky way those type of things you can make out that was so clear and uh and those are the things that really grabbed my imagination and i said you know one day i’m gonna i’m gonna be up there uh you have a good section in here you learned just an awesome lesson from your dad you say this as i grew older i would this is that this is now you’re working you’re working in the fields as i grew older i would learn the magnus or bad habits of the other workers this included bending the bottom of their metal buckets inward to create less volume and thus appear to fill each bucket even more quickly that’s for the cucumbers yes i would also learn how to swiftly reseat a bucket of papinos to make it look more full when it was really not all tricks of the trade i told myself this was how we hernandez kids spent our weekends and summers we knew that it was our responsibility to do and there was no way of getting around that every morning spent in the fields promised us the same routine of going to and fro picking fruits or vegetables from the ground as the rays of the hot sun hit our backs during one saturday in particular i fell over accidentally stepping on a yellow overgrown pepino that was rotten i remember its rotten stench as i threw down my bucket standing there thinking i’m all covered in mud i stink i’m tired and i’m sunburned my siblings continue working alongside my parents but i’m not going to anymore i want to go home watch tv and play i decided to quit i went to my father and pulled on his pant leg to tell him dad i’m tired i want to go home when he heard when i told him he leaned down took hold of both of my shoulders and with a surprised look on his face asked what’s wrong did something happen are you okay look at me i’m dirty i fell in the mud i want to leave plus i’ve already made 10 for the day i cried to him the day’s almost over he said just keep on working i don’t want to fine he said take a good look at yourself you don’t want to see you don’t like what you see right now you don’t like working in the fields in the hot sun or getting dirty am i right well if you quit now you’ll be creating a pattern that is easy to conform to if you don’t work hard in school or in life this will be your future is that what you want no i answered him well then don’t settle for ten dollars the day is almost over get back to work he ordered with just the right balance of authority and love and his version of tough love what my father told me that day in the fields changed the trajectory of my life it turned into the speech that transcended the end of a long day of working in the fields we would hear it when all four of us sat in the back seat of our ramshackle car father would turn around to look at us before he would turn on the engine and he would say so how do you guys feel right now we of course tired sweaty covered with mud and we would answer accordingly good he would say because you kids have the privilege of living your future right now living our future right now we would ask curiously yes he would say i’m not going to force you to go to school or get good grades but if you don’t this is the type of job you’ll have for the rest of your life this is the future that awaits you so if you want to quit school right now no problem i invite you to start coming to work with me every day as of tomorrow my father’s words made me realize that if i continued going to school i could do whatever it was i wanted to do in life if i studied hard i might one day make enough money so my parents would no longer have to work in the fields to this day i believe my father’s words changed the course of my destiny and i am so grateful to him for that i sometimes talk about the fact that i think one of the hardest things for kids to do is connect what they’re doing right now to their future they don’t understand that is that how hard they work right now is gonna going to put them wherever they end up in the future and your dad made that connection loud and clear for you all didn’t it exactly and he put it very well in saying you have the privilege because he said you know your neighbors you know aren’t working in the fields during the summer they’re off goofing off and having fun uh your friends they’re in the neighborhood they’re not doing that but you are so see they don’t know what their future is like so they’re happy go lucky carefree and they don’t care deadly squad about going to school but you know what your future is at here it is you’re living it so you want to do this the rest of your life and i said man i don’t want to do this i think i’m gonna i’m gonna do well in school because i want something better than this and so so it was a hard lesson i know my my kid one of my kids was telling me the other day we were walking through our town and there was you know like a some some homeless drug addicts clearly on drugs clearly just in a totally bad position in life and they were telling me that when they were little i walk by those people and say that’s what drugs do to you and they remember that it’s the same yeah the same typical same type of approach your dad took exactly exactly left an impression on you um so now i’m gonna fast forward a little bit again you got to get the book to get the whole story i’m skipping giant swaths of the book but um going fast forward a little bit here things at school continue to get better making friends became easier and speaking english became less of a challenge as time passed i did not consider myself fluent in the language until the age of 12 on the other hand mathematics never gave me any problems i had my routine down and i followed it strictly as a soldier would every day after school i would do my homework watch tv and then play outside the only things that differ from day to day were the questions that invaded my mind i made it my personal mission to track down the answers to every single query that popped into my thoughts constantly pursuing knowledge while satisfying my curiosity you were into school huh yeah you know what really helped was um my father you know in those days they um they had the world book encyclopedia and they used to have salesmen that would come to your house and they sell them to you and i remember my dad they came one day and it was expensive it wasn’t this is like 300 back then it was like 300 some odd dollars or something you know my parents didn’t have that kind of money but they bought the whole a through z selection glad they didn’t just get like a through e exactly they bought the whole thing and man whenever i needed to find something out it’s the good old world book encyclopedia i would read it i would even go to bathroom and take you know a with me or b or whatever and you know thumb through it as you do your business but but that you know those little things that my father did really uh really helped out where do you think your your father obviously he had this incredible grasp on the fact of how important education was where did he get that from i think um i think he got it from the fact that he had been working in the fields himself since since was 15 he came even before then back at home he used to work in the fields and i think he realized he says hey i don’t want to put my kids through this and when he saw when he came to to um the states you know he saw what people uh would that had an education what kind of jobs they have and that’s what he kind of you know wanted us my mother you know both my father and my mother had they have they if they had gotten an education i think they would have been well-renowned psychologists because uh they were they were like expert expert motivators uh my mother i remember every friday we used to um we used to cash uh the ch we used to get paid in the field they still gave you checks paper checks back then and um and so on friday after work we would go directly to a gas station chevron gas station and had a little mini mart my siblings would go inside while my dad gassed up and uh they would buy you know chips and soda sodas and um and and i would say hey get me one too because my mom would then drag me like across the street to bank of america to to cashless checks and um and i remember we were standing there inside the bank it was about four in the afternoon hot summer day about over 100 outside and you know you’re going to a bank nice and cool right and that air conditioning uh and so we’re standing there in line and i’m minding my own business enjoying the cool the cool weather there and uh and then i i feel a tug on my shirt and it’s my mom he said i said what’s up mom and she points to what obviously is the bank manager and she says what do you see there it was this dude you know a very nice tailored suit with a nice tie and dress very nice and obviously he was you know one of the muckety mugs there in the bank right and i said well i see a man and she says no i said i see you i said look at yourself right now of course i was sweaty kind of dry cake mud on my levi’s pants and uh tired it says look at your hands and you know they’re all dirty and everything i said this is why you have to point into my head says this is why you have to work with this if you work with this that’s how you’re going to dress and this is where you’re going to work in a place like this air conditioning inside in the shade but if you work with this says your body is going to break down you may be able to do it for a few years but eventually your body’s going to break down so she would always say oh ho i you know you better do well in school so they both kind of like bombarded us from different directions and uh subtle and not too subtle ways of uh of making sure and she was the one that was um helped us develop the study habits because as soon as we came home you know my parents would always race from the fields back home to make sure they were home before we got home from school so we wouldn’t find an empty house and my mom’s routine was she would dart to the kitchen she would make her fresh tortillas uh the beans rice and salsa and that was the bait because we would come home from school we’ll come home from school we were hungry and she would sit us down and she would feed us but then we couldn’t get up he says crack open your books show me that you finish your homework do your homework and show me your finish and only until then we would be allowed to get up and go to uh play outside with our friends but she was the one that instilled those study habits that you know came in handy once you started college uh the fact that you had that discipline of saying hey i gotta take care of this before i can enjoy myself here’s another impactful moment fast forward a little bit it was during that particular summer of 1969 when a major event occurred that would make a big difference in my life despite the war in vietnam the internal conflicts in the u s and the hippie movement it was an important year for humanity it was a year that left a strong impression on me at the tender age of seven on the morning of july 20th 1969 the entire world was glued to the television set waiting in awe for an historic event to take place mankind had managed to do the unthink unthinkable a person was about to set foot on the moon later that night the first images of neil armstrong on the surface of the la luna were transmitted into households around the globe when he put his foot on the moon and he uttered the famous line that transcended time that’s one small step for man one giant leap for mankind when i heard these words i felt indescribably shocked i was captivated by this man by this science which left me in awe absorbed in the broadcast i got up abruptly to get closer to the television screen i had an epiphany during that exact moment i discovered what i wanted to be when i grew up an astronaut and from that moment on i was determined that absolutely nothing would get in the way of my dream and thus the dream was born there it is you remember watching that huh yeah yeah it was such a big event uh you know i think everybody uh would uh in in the united in the whole world i was watching that because it was an amazement because to think that um you know the apollo rocket and the capsule you know which has less computing power than your average cell phone was able to go and using vacuum tube technology we were able to go to the surface of the moon send a couple humans down there and then bring him back home safe and sound i mean it was just amazing it was like uh star trek going live you know for real so i was just amazed and i was you know i was saying you know this is this is what i want to be another your parents are getting a lot of cred a lot of credit today here’s another little point where they get a ton of credit the only people i did share this dream with were my parents and to my pleasant surprise they offered me with words of encouragement my father sat me down at the same kitchen table where my mother made us do our homework every day and offered me a few words of advice he said if i followed his recipe i could do anything that i wanted to when i grew up because we lived in the united states he explained to me that my siblings and i had the opportunity to live the american dream looking at me very seriously he said first identify what you want to be when you grow up second know how far you are from your goal third draw yourself a road map that gives you all the steps it will take to get there fourth get yourself a good education fifth and finally apply the same work ethic that you have in your work in the fields to your books and subsequently to your job once you graduate from college mix all this together jose and you can be successful at anything you want to do including becoming an astronaut yeah out of the gate and i took that hook line and sinker because you know when when you’re seven and you’re 10 years old and your father tells you something you believe it so if he told me follow this recipe and you’ll become an astronaut and i took that hook line and sinker i said i’m going to be an astronaut i really believed it at the time because i said these are steps i can follow and i believe my father and this is why i love sharing that recipe because it works it works and this is why i uh i try to tell people i said to reach your full potential says follow these five simple ingredients later i added a sixth ingredient which is perseverance and we’ll talk about that a little later but but i added that six ingredients and i said you guys follow these six ingredients i said you know sky is no longer the limit spaces because i proved that you know what’s amazing when you were sitting there saying that when you’re a kid and your parents tell you something you listen to them i mean imagine if your dad would have had a different attitude imagine if your dad would have said oh you’ll never be an astronaut or you you don’t have the chance of doing it i would have never been never would have done it no because i would have believed them i said you know this is too monumental for me and where i’m at social economically you know it’s not for me and i would have believed it my dad would have told me that and but he didn’t it sounded like early on your dad especially was pretty adamant about you understanding that your future is your choice you know and he he provided the alternative right up front for you you experienced it you know working in the fields um and then so i’ve got to imagine you coming to him with a choice you’ve decided you know at this point as a young kid that space is is it for you you know being an astronaut so i’ve got to imagine you know he was really open to that and you know yeah and i’m certain you know he didn’t believe i could reach it right you know obviously but but he was uh so interested in us getting an education that it it’s like you know he said if that’s what motivates him to go to college finish high school and go to college so be it right i mean this is the same thing i tell my kid my oldest kid he’s a um he’s finishing up his phd in purdue in aerospace engineering has two masters at bachelor’s and um and and i told him you know when when i hooded him for his first masters you were standing there in line we had never talked about his future in terms of where he wanted to work and i thought he was uh he was done with his first masters but you know he said he was going to graduate school and he won his phd and i said oh cool great that’s great um and and and and um i remember i as a uh we were standing there in line i told him son why why purdue and he said that you know i took a page off of your book he says i um i made a list of all the astronauts that got selected by nasa or they graduated and guess which school has graduated the most astronauts i said let me guess purdue they say yes including neil armstrong and so so that’s when i told him you know that’s when i told him i said son if wanting to be an astronaut motivates you to get your phd i said you go on and be an astronaut because you know what once you get that phd there’s going to be a lot of opportunities opened up for you you may not make it to be an astronaut but i think you will i said i think you can make it but you’re going to have so many other choices in life with two masters and a phd and bachelors and so uh so yeah exactly powerful yeah um your family eventually um moves into a little place and eventually buys a place yes eventually buys a place you say here after a few more years of renting my parents would buy this house from the landlord the landlord facilitated a rent to own finance plan that i as a 12 year old kid helped translate and explained to my father finally the family had a place to call home although our new barrio or neighborhood was far from ideal it had a slew of problems just as any other barrio in south and east stockton did since we were in the old in one of the older more dispressed neighborhood we witnessed far more crime than other people who lived in the newer part of town i started to become more fast forward a little bit i started to become more social at school and in my barrio it was at fremont middle school where i met carlos and his older brother alberto another person i hung around with in school was my friend sergio he lived across the street from me the four of us were like brothers we stick together through our adolescent years we were there for each other in good times and in bad times do you guys know what a poacher is ask carlos while we were sitting on the stairs in front of my house no sergio and i answered jointly apocho is a mexican born here in the united states who is neither a mexican nor an american like us he explained carlos and sergio wore those white t-shirts without sleeves baggy gray khaki pants and shiny black stacy adams dress shoes that always look too big for their feet their accessories generally consisted of a bandana either neatly folded in their back pocket or worn around their head covering most of their forehead and a chain that hung from their belt loop is it a bad thing to be a pocho i asked no but in case you haven’t noticed they don’t seem to like us here in the u s or in mexico they will pick on us here or there that’s why we have to stick together if we don’t we’ll be easy targets and they’ll get us who will get us the gringos and the mexicans that have come straight from mexico as i said they don’t like us when we go to mexico they tell us that we’re too americanized meanwhile the gringos call us dirty mexicans either way we can’t win it’s like we have no roots and don’t belong and don’t seem to belong in either place i’m telling you that’s why we have to stick together fast forward a little bit things around my neighborhood were never easy gangs were everywhere they were they and they congregated on a daily basis hoping to define their territories drugs like marijuana were commonly used and sold in arbario drive-by shootings occurred to a lesser extent but nonetheless kept the neighborhood on edge families were dysfunctional divided and grew apart due to inattentive parents suffering from alcoholism or other various addictions the children from these broken homes were quickly recruited to join gangs so year after year the membership of these groups multiplied i admit that it was difficult to escape that environment although i managed to steer clear of such activities i had to somewhat assimilate in order to survive soon my appearance and attitude begin to change as i spent more time with carlos alberto and sergio i became tougher and tougher or so i thought i began wearing baggy pants oversized flannel shirts and shoes that were one size too big i walked down the streets with an attitude while i was emulating alberto’s gestures my objective was to conceal the true jose while trying to look like the rest of my peers i did not want to be labeled a schoolboy or bookworm so that i could avoid being harassed however when i was in class and with my family i was my true self i was playful studious and responsible but when i was on the streets i was one of the homeboys as we pochos would call ourselves the price of assimilation was steep soon i started to deny i knew how to speak spanish and i began paying less attention to my mexican [Music] roots so there’s some alternative paths besides the one that you were trying to go down that’s right that’s right uh you know these three friends of mine that what age group what age are you at this point this is a junior high this is so we’re talking like 12 13 12 13 14 yeah yeah and and it’s it’s at that point where you kind of you know there’s there’s some points in your life that marks you that says hey you know i’ve got to change the way things are in in the direction i’m heading because i was doing that with my friends because you had to do that in the neighborhood but then you went back to school you went back home and you try to clean yourself up so that your parents don’t see like you’re turning into a thug right kind of thing and and and and then you start thinking about okay i’m doing this more and more and more am i going in too deep kind of thing and you try to extract yourself from it and and you see your my buddies you know they went into it and you know they went into it feet first and didn’t try to come back they you know they embraced it and got deeper and deeper then started using drugs i didn’t use drugs then they started dealing with drugs and you know when i started seeing all these things of how it was changing them because they were a good two three months ahead of me in the process of transformation if you will and i saw where they were hidden i kind of saw that road map and i said man i don’t want to be like them and little by little i just started pulling away hanging out less and less with him and uh to the point that when i got into high school you know what these guys did made the transition to high school probably one semester and then they just stopped going and i kept going to high school of course and uh and so so they were still my homeboys they were still in the neighborhood and um and in a sense it was great that they were still around because you know that was kind of like the protection that i that i had in the neighborhood because they knew i was you know everybody else knew i was associated with them and so no one there messed with me because then they had to respond to these guys and these guys were very good and you know they respect the decision i made and it’s not like they harass me and say oh now we’re going to get you now because you left that they actually said no you go do it that’s uh that’s pretty awesome for them to be able to say that because a lot of times what you find with kids is they don’t want anyone to get ahead they don’t want anyone to go further they’d rather just drag them back down and and i see that in every actually i see that not just with kids i see that without with humans human beings there’s a lot of human beings that when somebody makes a move to try and elevate and try and go further and try and do more people discourage them instead of encouraging them yeah it’s the crabs in the bucket crabs one starts coming out hey come on down here and you get pulled back down so that’s a real it’s a real testament to those guys that they actually instead of trying to drag you back down they tried to lift you up and help you get out of there um was there was there anything that that happened that you saw well how did you recognize that the path that they were going down was not the right path because you know you write it about it in here here are these guys you know when you’re 13 14 years old what do you want well you want money you want girls you know you want a cool car you want to be popular and here were these guys well guess what they had money they had you know they have girls they had girls so they they kind of had the stuff that a young 14 15 year old kid wants how did you realize that the path that they were going down was the wrong path uh very easy we went we went uh cruising one day we would cruise around stribley park and then we got shot at that wakes you up i said i don’t want to be a statistic you know we got shot at and because these guys are dealing and i must have been dealing in the wrong area and they got shot at and i was in there you know innocent bystander yet but i was there and they were caring uh you know and i said man i don’t want to do this this is not how i want to end up and you were able to see that luckily yeah you know you tell you’ve got another story in here that’s uh an interesting story it’s a good it’s just a good life lesson you found a wallet with money tell us that story real quick yeah yeah we found a um i found a wallet and um and i forget how much money it had a significant had like about six seven hundred dollars in it cash and uh but it had a uh it had a you know an id and everything and i had an address and everything and um and i remember i found it i went home to my dad you know and i said dad i found this wallet i said what’s in it i said there’s about 600 bucks in my dad looks at it first and you know i could see the temptation he had just as i did and i think more than anything he just wanted to teach me a lesson and said you know um if there’s an owner here we ought to try and reach out for him and and try and do and unfortunately he lived like in oakland or somewhere he was visiting uh relatives so we waited like about a week or two when we had a weekend and then we drove to oakland and we found the address and then i gave it to the guy the guy it was an older man you know probably in the 60s and said something about he had sold something of course i’m not forget what he did and said he had lost the whole wallet and he thought he would never see it he couldn’t believe it and uh he gave me a 20 reward or something like that and i was happy i said i did something good and i got 20 bucks out of it so and i think he gave my dad another 20 for the gas and stuff yeah but yeah but teaching that lesson of the doing the right thing yeah doing the right thing even though it might sting your sting your finances a little bit it’s still the right thing to do that’s what your dad would want you to know and that was at the same age that was kind of that same same time frame 14 no that was a little younger probably a little younger i was probably about 11 okay still that kind of money yeah as an 11 year old yeah it’s a lot of money yeah it’s a lot of money today yeah for me 600 bucks 14 i probably would have said hey you know this is a good down payment for my car that i’m going to get next year or something but no i was too young uh fast forward a little bit um i started my freshman year freshman year of high school at franklin high school at east stockton at that time frank was one of the toughest schools in stockton with a delicate balance of caucasian latino and african-american students fast forward i i found refuge in something i awkwardly called my best friend [Music] math yes math made me smile it was fun it remained my strongest subject as i maintained good grades throughout four years in high school you talk about a guy uh mr zendayas and he told you you were kind of talking to him about you know your past and your your history and your ancestors and he said i think you can find who you really are in the history of your ancestors country i know i did jose don’t ever be ashamed of your culture and its traditions they are what make up your identity you should be proud of who you are do you know why no i answered attentively because you belong to two countries in two cultures and that’s a wonderful thing not everyone is as fortunate as you are so that’s an that’s a a kind of a reversal on the pocho thing where they’re telling you don’t speak spanish like people like your friends hey we’re we we don’t speak spanish you were hiding the fact that you spoke spanish yes yes and uh and i’ll tell you shortly after uh south my teacher said that you know i i think i was in a junior in high school and i’m not sure if you talk about the homecoming float but but it it falls it falls very good uh with this story was when um when i was a a a junior in high school um you know i started participating in student government senior i became a student body president but in junior i was barely starting so i was part of the student council and so i went to the meetings and we were getting ready for homecoming and of course every class the senior class the junior class the sophomore freshman have a float right and they they have a homecoming float and i remember ours we we we wanted to build a float and everything and um and they were saying okay but we need a uh a flatbed and a truck does anyone have a flatbed and truck and no one had one because my dad drove a flatbed in a truck so i knew i had one right but i wouldn’t say anything because i knew my dad my dad is not going to lend it to us in the sense of drop it off somewhere where we can work and use it and then uh he’ll go pick it up once we’re done he’s not like that he’s good he’s he’s the type that says oh yeah you guys want sure you can use it but know you guys come here so i can keep my eye on my truck and my flatbed so so so you have to come here and of course we lived in east stockton worst part of stockton and we lived in at the time it was a that two-bedroom dilapidated rental that we still didn’t own yet and um actually we did own it by then so we owned it but it was in the worst part of stockton and um and and so i was embarrassed to have my classmates come to my house because i figure you know surely they live in better houses than this two-bedroom dilapidated uh piece of junk that we lived in right but that was our home and so i resisted and we had meeting after meeting and then it became clear that the very last meeting they were going to cancel the junior entry for the homecoming flow because we didn’t have we didn’t have a flatbed or a truck i finally had to fess up i said you know i have one and oh you do great i said but there’s a catch and i said what’s that we got to build a float in my house in our front yard there at the flatbeds there my dad won’t let take it anywhere oh don’t worry we’ll go and what’s the address so i gave him the address and you know and building the float it’s after class they usually start on a monday because of the thing is on friday um and and so we start on monday and uh and so people came and i remember the first that was kind of like embarrassed but you know if they all jumped on the truck they started working on it then all of a sudden my mom starts bringing in burritos tacos agua fresca my dad brings out the boombox and puts music my brothers and sisters start helping out and then the next day word got out hey there’s good food and music party party so it got bigger you know by thursday it was like you know it was overflowing and not it was great and um and i remember a a guy a friend of mine um comes to me and um and he looks at me and he says man i’m so jealous of you and i said jealous of me and this is a caucasian guy lived in north side of stockton good place though he had one of those uh you know what smoking the bandit cars oh a trans am trans am you know he had barely started driving and he got a new car and he said he was jealous of me and i said i said dude look what you’re driving and you’re jealous of me and he said yeah i said you know i um sure i have this new car and i live in north stockton says but you know my parents are divorced i never see my dad my mom’s a nurse she works long hours i hardly see her i always come home to an empty house and the thing you come home do this this is what i want and that’s when i realized that you know bringing in both parts of my culture to identify who jose is was the best thing to do and that’s when i stopped being embarrassed of my mexican heritage that’s when i embraced it and i said you know with lots of pride yeah i’m a mexican-american because i’m able to get the best of both cultures to define who jose is today and uh and so that’s you know after hearing sent mr sanders’s uh words you know i put it to use and i realized i had this conclusion that said hey it’s not bad getting the best things above cultures of course there’s people that get the worst things above cultures and that that’s real bad uh you know i thought that’s my buddies down the street but but but you know that’s uh that’s another thing it’s it’s all on what you focus on too right exactly you know you you focused on those positive aspects you know pursued that took you places yeah um you talk about that you did end up being the like you said the student body uh president class president that’s pretty cool you talk about the election in here and stuff like that um fast forward a little bit you say one day i heard news a news brief on the radio that said costa rican franklin chang diaz the first latino american astronaut candidate at nasa makes his dream come true the news commentator talked in depth about dr chang diaz’s struggles and triumphs in his quest to become an astronaut quote franklin chang was born in 1950 in san jose costa rica he was sent to the united states after finishing his secondary education with only 50 to his name and without knowing a single word of english he recounted that all he had was a suitcase full of aspirations end quote so you had a little someone to relate to a little bit you were looking at him that way exactly well i figured he he was uh opening the road for others i said you know once they selected the first hispanic american astronaut i said well then you know that opens the door up for me and uh and and so so yeah so so he was someone that really kind of put fuel to my added fuel to my fire of wanting to become an astronaut because now i said uh now i know it’s possible because he’s living proof then and i re it resonated so much because you know he had brown skin like i have he spoke with an accent like i did and he came from very humble beginnings just like i did i said well if he can do it why can’t i and so it empowered me uh you got into a bunch of different universities get done with high school fast forward a little bit you end up going to the university of the pacific which is up in stockton had a great engineering program um and it would allow you to be at home yeah i saved on room and board and then i was able to work in the fall at the cannery during the night shift i remember you know the first two months of school was always tough because it was august september and then as you get more seniority you go into october november in the canneries and then you get laid off but i i remember uh you know it’s tough uh because you go to work at and that cannery was only a block away so i would walk to the cannery from my house and i would walk in this big yellow raincoat because i worked and clean up from 10 at night to six in the morning and then i would get home shower eat something and then my classes start at eight o’clock at eop finished till about two three and then did some homework uh and then fell asleep about seven and about nine thirty get back up and go back to work on the grind underground literally yeah so but you know it was only a short period like three months kind of thing on average it was about three months uh but you know that helped me the calorie paid pretty well compared to field work so they paid very well so that along with the fact that i didn’t have to pay room and board allowed me to go to pacific and you know pay the tuition my part of the tuition because i got cal grand pell grant those type of assistants to get uh to help pay for the tuition i gotta cover this one one section cause we talked about a little bit um talk about your friends here years later after drifting apart i would find out that he did this is carlos he did indeed not continue his education he ended up doing low-skilled work in low-paying draw jobs drugs robbed his brother alberto of his future they found alberto’s lifeless body in his apartment an autopsy revealed that he died of a drug overdose probably a result of heroin or cocaine use as for my neighbor sergio he too did not have an opportunity to make something of himself one day years later as i was getting an award for one of my projects i received a call from my mother who told me that the neighbors stumbled upon his body which was hanging from a tree in the park to my knowledge no arrests were made in connection with his death it remains unclear as to whether it was a suicide or a homicide i truly believe my friends were not the individuals they appeared to be they were just three little boys who needed role models in their lives to steer them in the right direction if someone would have made them realize the importance of going to school or infused them with self-confidence their destinies would have been very different when i received word of their deaths i felt impotent wondering perhaps if i could have done something to help them make the right decisions you know when you were talking earlier about um mrs young or ms young and it’s not just educators you know that have the opportunity to have a huge impact on people’s lives you know anybody if you’re listening to this right now you can you can help so many people that you reach out talk to them try and show them and show them the right direction i mean it’s you don’t have to be in a in a position of authority to be able to help people and steer them in the right direction and it’s um you know and and that was the great differentiator between uh them and i you look at my parents that were involved you know they didn’t know i mean that sure they didn’t go to pta meetings and none of that but they were involved with you know keeping an eye on us making sure we wouldn’t stray and making sure we were doing well in school whereas with my friends you know one for for one of them the one that lives across the street uh he um you know his father was never there he would only come he would come home like a day or two days before the first why because that was when the welfare check arrived and he would sweet talk his wife you know take like 90 of the money disappear for the rest of the month and then give them 10 to fend for the rest of the month for the whole family which was terrible and then uh on the other side the two brothers uh both the mother and father were alcoholics and uh and so it was non you know it was a dysfunctional family on both sides there that that didn’t help him and and so you when you become successful and then you hear what happens to your buddies you can’t you know feel you know you can’t help it but to feel bad because you say is there anything i could have done to have uh uh help them along the way so that they wouldn’t have end up the way they have been you know ended up in you know one odd and another one still selling drugs on the street and the other one apparent suicide and you say you know you do feel guilty because you say you know maybe i could have done something but you know who knows um you know speaking of people having him tell us a little bit about uh senora bello oh senora beyo okay yeah she’s uh she was a tough cookie uh she started off in um actually in in junior high and then when we went to high school she actually transferred to the high school so we got a double dose of her which i don’t know it was good or bad but the the first dose i got of her was uh in junior high and uh and she was the one that basically remember i told you i started forgetting my spanish and everything she’s the one that sort of turned that around and said no you will learn spanish and you will learn it in a correct manner you know and all that stuff as a matter of fact i went i went to guadalajara she was a spanish teacher so she set up a trip to mexico and we went to a blind school and got boarded there and uh and would spend like two weeks during easter in in in mexico and uh and so sham she was tough as nails uh you know she was a tough cookie tough grader everything didn’t cut you any slack and um and then in high school um she became biology teacher so then i went to mexico baja california twice with her again on easter with the biology kids and we would do uh plant taxonomy in marine biology uh in in baja and you know we we would like make corners of uh different quadrants and we would have to classify every plant in that quadrant so you get a good uh idea of what kind of vegetation existed in the baja desert kind of thing and then we were always sleeping under a tent and stuff like that so it was it was uh it was interesting times there and again she was very very tough on us but but you know that’s what prepared me for college man because uh without her toughness i think i wouldn’t have uh had the the mental toughness to uh get through physics and chemistry and calculus and all those engineering courses yeah you ran into her as you were starting university and and one of the things she told you and this is going back to the book she said you’re all grown up now jose you’re about to turn 18 and embark on embark on your college career you know i was once young in college just like you i know the challenges you’re going to face the only thing i ask of you is not to forget who you are and where you come from don’t allow anything or anyone to deter you from your schoolwork she she was staying on you yeah yeah she was she was a second mother she was exactly like a second mother and so she kept an eye on this uh you got a cool story in here i gotta i gotta read this one because it i was i enjoyed it um you’re checking into your first one of these classes good morning class i’m professor andres rodriguez i will be teaching you physics are there any questions dr rodriguez was very short man with silvery white hair who always seemed to have an unlit cigar used more like a pacifier in his mouth or his hand he talked with a very heavy accent because of the cigar i guess he was of cuban descent later i would find out my assumptions to be correct will a syllabus be handed out asked a female classmate classmate very hesitantly syllabus there’s no need for one the curriculum of this class is going to be something none of you have ever seen before it’s not going to make any sense without me personally guiding you throughout the semester let’s begin shall we i shivered with goosebumps when i heard him speak in what i thought was an unfriendly tone looking around the classroom and seeing all the new faces once again brought me back to the same feelings i had when i was in elementary school when i was trying to figure out what the writing on the chalkboard meant the only difference now was that the board was plastered with symbols and numbers not words in a foreign language i did not know just 10 minutes into his lecture i was beginning to think that there was no way i would ever pass this class the chalkboard was filling up with one physics formula after another i might as well have been staring at egyptian hieroglyph griffix the professor rodriguez was talking and writing so quickly that i could barely keep up i just wrote down everything he wrote down as fast as i could without understanding any of it any questions he asked no one raised a hand i took a deep breath and as i exhaled i dared to raise my hand professor rodriguez i really don’t understand anything you just wrote on the board i told him some of my classmates began to laugh making me feel like an idiot for raising my hands professor rodriguez looked at me smiled and asked what’s your name jose i responded well jose the reason why you don’t understand anything that i wrote is because it’s nonsense it’s it’s nonsense it’s a joke and if you all look closely you will see that this was a lesson in disguised in disguise everyone became silent embarrassed by both their own ignorance and their fair fear of not speaking up they all seemed to wish they had found themselves asking for clarification that’s a good trick you referred back to someone else here dr jones who said don’t ever be left with any doubts or questions better to be ignorant for a moment than for life if you don’t understand something simply ask that’s correct good lesson learned right there yeah well you know i figured you know and dr jones was a uh the director of a program there at uop university pacific uh the community involvement program which gave scholarships to kids from the local area to attend the university which is a private university and you know they paid up to like 80 percent of your tuition so i remember you know we had like a two-week orientation before school started and one of the things this is this was a african-american tall gentleman dr jones and um and he would always call us you know his kids you know from the program but he would always say hey you need to sit in the front of the class don’t sit in the back why get it filtered sit in the front ask questions always do and it says uh and then he would say you know jose um you know we’re giving you a scholarship right i said yeah i said but how much are you paying a year i said i have to still have to come up with about three thousand dollars he says okay get your money’s worth and and so that’s exactly what i thought of when dr rodriguez was doing all this stuff and i was sitting there in front and writing everything i understand none of this scrap don’t understand it and i said man i’m paying three grand i said i’m going to ask i want my money’s worth so i asked and i said i don’t understand this and that’s when he said good i’m glad you don’t because you shouldn’t or i said i just wanna teach you guys the lessons that because we’re gonna go through a tough course here if you guys have any questions you ask them so don’t assume because it’s only going to get worse it says it’s going to get worse if you let it pile on you need to understand the basics so ask questions then he started with his lesson yeah i didn’t go to college until i was older the navy sent me to college when i was 28 years old and i was i would sit right in the front row and if a professor talked about something that i didn’t understand i would immediately raise my hand i don’t understand that because i was i was a grown man you know i didn’t care what the other kids thought i just wanted to make sure i understood what they were putting out but that’s something i learned in the seal teams if you’re starting to learn a tactic or a technique and you’re not getting it and you try and pretend like you get it it’s gonna catch you and it’s gonna bite you it’s gonna bite you it’s gonna bite you the same thing being an astronaut you say you can’t pretend you gotta understand because you know what there’s a little button it could save you or kill you uh fast forward a little bit you end up with a job opportunity this was not only a job it was an opportunity lawrence liver livermore national laboratory is a premier research facility dedicated to national defense and is funded through the department of energy it was located just 40 miles from my home allowing me to commute to work while i was making some money too i could not stop thinking of how i would feel on the first day walking through those doors so you had this opportunity to get this job at a at a lab that’s a huge opportunity yes yes it was premier national laboratory r d and uh in defense applications so uh and what year did you do that was that was that did you start interning there and yes i started interning in 83 and again in 84 and then i got offered a job in 85 career but i went to my uh master’s degree and then i got hired in 87 full-time um fast forward a little bit in may of 1985 at the age of 22 i found myself dressed in a black and orange graduation gown with my standard issued black cap ready for college graduation i could hear my mother’s applause as i walked across the stage to receive my diploma because it was the loudest with my degree in hand i stopped to show her what i’d written on top of my cap before exiting the stage it read hola mama it was a symbol of my gratitude for everything she had done for me for my entire life i remember clearly how everyone turned to look at her as she rose from her seat and how her crystalline eyes which were holding back tears met mine as she blew me a kiss big day yeah very big you say i wasted no time starting my career at lawrence livermore national laboratory in livermore california um this is where you decide well gotta go through the mindset here i came to the conclusion that for me to flourish and successfully compete in this environment i needed to obtain a postgraduate degree this realization coupled with the fact that i could not stop thinking about how i could get into the nasa astronaut program led me to my next big decision in life to attend graduate school after all dr franklin chang diaz had a doctorate degree and nasa chose him to go into space so you’re checking these boxes end up going to university of uh california in santa barbara and this is the first time you got to go to school where all you had to do was go to school exactly and then the first time away from home too okay and uh and and so uh but yes it was the first time i i had a full-ride scholarship even paid for my room and board and my only job was to go to school because every other time when i was in undergraduate i was in the cannery working in restaurants work study tutoring doing everything i was always busy and and here the only thing i had to do was go to school and it was so easy luxury it was luxury it was so easy because i said well what else do i always felt when i was there felt so guilty because i said what else do i need to do i said no you’re all caught up yeah that’s luxury i i had that kind of luxury too so i went to college then like i said the navy sent me to college but the navy for some reason it was an old program i got commissioned as an officer before i went to college so then i did two years at a seal team then they sent me to college so i was an officer i didn’t have like johnny kim who you know johnny kim he when he went to college he had to do rotc and we went to the same college university but he had to go to rotc and put on his uniform and do whatever the navy requirements were to do yeah me i was just just going to college i was the exact same as you just getting a full pay i would get a paycheck my deal was even better than yours i think because i was getting a full navy paycheck yeah yeah i was the highest paid college freshman of all time it was only and getting your tuition paid right yeah and my tuition was fully paid yeah it was really good that’s great but for you going from where you all your career you were working at the cannery from 10 o’clock at night till 6 in the morning and now you’re just there just focused on school exactly luxury exactly it was awesome um you were kind of making a transition to another level meanwhile this happens going back the book couple murdered in stockton news article the article confirmed that the victims were family members from my father’s side dumbfounded i immediately called my parents to inform them of the tragedy but they already knew they were distraught understandably so i started thinking my parents live in a neighborhood similar to the one where my theo and dia were just murdered how could i allow my own parents to continue living in such a place so you start feeling like you got to do something on your parents now this is where you start getting psychological back on your tests right because you knew you could just say hey i want to move you in with me well they’re going to be resistant yeah they’re going to be resistant because they’re used to the old neighborhood all used to the you know the corner supermarket and those type of stuff and i knew there was going to be resistance right but i wanted to get him out of that neighborhood because i said you know same thing that happened to my uncles right could happen to them and of course they were resistant so go ahead you go ahead what’d you do you played a little psychological warfare on them yeah well you know i had i had just bought a house myself because i was working at livermore so i bought my first uh three bedroom two bath house in north stockton nice area and i was living by myself of course and and somehow i wanted to get them to come live with me and of course they resisted they said no me this is our home this is where we belong this is i said yeah but look what happened to uh uncle nat and said no no that’s not gonna happen to us and uh finally i said this this is what i’m gonna do i said i’m gonna i’m gonna tell mom that i really need uh help with the house cleaning and uh and and and also i’m gonna go to the pharmacy they’ll buy me a few condoms and kind of just kind of hide them where she could find them [Laughter] and and i know she was going to clean and she’s going to find them she’s probably not going to say anything to me about them but i know she’s going to have a conversation with dad and and and the conversation i figured i kind of figured i said she’s going to say hey we have to move over there make sure our kid doesn’t make a mistake look what i found this and and there’s a good catholic you know parents old-fashioned so uh so so it worked it worked to the t it worked the next thing i know is they’re packing their stuff and they’re moving over so so yes i did use a little bit of psychology to get them over there and we’ve never talked about it since then she hasn’t mentioned it i’ve never mentioned it and uh it just worked yeah it doesn’t work fast forward a little bit in 1991 you lost your your grandfather yes um and that was i mean your family was close even though you even though you spent less and less time in mexico as you got older you still i mean it was this was like a huge this is a huge huge impact for you huge loss yes because i grew up um as a kid i would spend three months over there in their house with them growing up with them you know my parents were there my siblings were there cousins would come over and uh but my grandfather and uh and grandmother were there and so you know they were like the the matriapp and patriarch of the family kind of thing and and so uh it was a big loss when when when we lost them yeah because then well you’re abuela then shortly thereafter you say this god must not have wanted to experience such grief for two long months after my grandfather’s death death her alzheimer’s rapidly accelerated and robbed her of her last memory was not long before she reunited with her soul mate that’s great and then you lost your your mother’s mother as well right and all this happened in a pretty short period sure with a period of about three years i lost all three of them my my grandfather on my mother’s side he passed the way of tuberculosis when i was about two or three years so he got to know me i don’t remember him but he got to know who i was but uh but yeah in the short span of those about three years we lost all all three uh grandparents now as this is happening you’re you’re still at working at this lab and while that’s going on december 8th 1991 the soviet union falls apart yes which is has effects i mean global effects obviously this was a superpower this was the you know the the fall of communism and you say this in the book it was not long after the fall of the soviet union that ex the expensive star wars defense programs such as our own x-ray laser program came up on the congressional budget’s chopping block yes so you were working you were working on things that were used for defense yes uh the the project i um i had work when i got hired as a career employee because i had worked at the lab already but when i got hired as a career employee they gave me a choice of about three projects they had um they had a life extension program where they extended the life of nuclear warheads and so you worked on on on how to evaluate them and certify them so they can stay longer on the shelf and we call them good in good operating order that was one project the other one was working in the national ignition facility nif where is nuclear fusion 192 x-ray beams creating nuclear fusion to create energy which was pretty interesting but the third one was uh developing an x-ray laser this is a nuclear pumped x-ray laser where you have a nuclear event and you have a beam of focus x-rays that would um it would be up deployed up in space that would um that would be pointed to any uh oncoming soviet missiles in the event of a first strike by the russians when those missiles go exothermic up in space you detonate this device you have high energy x-ray particles that take out the electronics package and then they float off harmlessly and so so out of all these three three projects um that’s the one that interests me because we had to put it up in space so i figured you know yeah i gotta learn how to put hardware up in space i think nasa would be interested in this not to mention working on a nuclear x-ray laser exactly exactly and and we would we would do our testing in nevada test site this is when underground nuclear testing was allowed and you know whenever they did any nuclear event um you know the labs uh they would give you real estate you they would have about 30 experiments in a nuclear event so they had a whole team that just dedicated to preparing for a nuclear event and then they say okay this is your real estate and you would go down there and put your package in our case it’s the the x-ray itself right next to the bomb and then bunch of diagnostics uh fiber optics so that when it happens we’re able to measure the flux how strong those x-rays are and how you know the density of it and all that so we can basically measure its performance and that’s what we were doing and uh and so to me it was great it was uh and yeah they would throw money at it so money was never an issue in terms of i need this i need that and we would uh so it was fun times until the soviet union collapsed and then uh justification for grandiose projects and justifiably so went away and so that’s why they canceled it yeah you know uh you described this well when you’re talking about how much money you were able to utilize you say i credit the advances in defense shield projects such as our own x-ray laser as leading to the downfall of the former soviet union in short reagan’s strategy that’s ronald reagan reagan’s strategy worked my own conclusion leads me to believe that an effort to keep up with the joneses the soviet union dedicated the bulk of its budget to similar programs while paying less attention to their economy and internal infrastructure as a result the ussr created the perfect social and economic storm that led to unrest and its eventual downfall that’s great fast forward a little bit one question started to linger in my mind was how could we utilize to our advantage the insight gathered from the work on the x-ray laser my boss and mentor clint logan could not have agreed more clint decided that mammography was the best way to match both our skills and the tools we had developed that’s a big leap we had we also had personal motives for improving mammography the wife of our leader in the x-ray laser program had been diagnosed with breast cancer and i had just lost a young friend to the disease on many occasions i served as an interpreter for my 28 year old friend and her husband as she underwent treatment for her cancer i was astonished to learn that eventually one in eight women in the united states acquires this horrible disease so you guys figured out that some of the technology that you had used or you had invented could actually be used in a positive way for helping detect breast cancer that’s correct the the area i was in charge of for the x-ray laser was evaluating the man-made materials called aerogels that that were used as pads for the x-ray laser and the way i evaluated them was i would x-ray them and um and create images to see how homogeneous this man-made material was so that so that you could match it because uh you you had to put about eight eight of these type of bricks on both sides and you got to match the interfaces else they lose energy as it transfers from one interface to the other and the way i did it was i i did x-ray imaging but then i also started uh to fool around with how x-rays interact with matter and i and i started writing some code called uh monte carlo 3d uh code analysis that that models how the x-rays uh react with with matter because some x-rays go through some get completely absorbed and some collide with material and create lower energy x-rays and that scatter which is noise in the image and so i modeled all that and when when the when the um project got cancelled this was a like a neat little tool and so clint my boss and i felt like we had an answer but we didn’t know what the question was and then when all of a sudden we got sensitized to breast cancer and we said i wonder if we can redesign the mammography machines that create these images because uh they use film uh and they develop the film and then the doctors look at it and light table well we created a electronic detector and we designed the x-ray tube to be more optimal for human tissue uh diagnosis and uh and we were able to create the what’s called the first fulfilled digital mammography system for earlier detection of cancer earlier because we demonstrated that our images had much more information content than the film screen images and then we opened up a whole new area of study called computer-aided diagnosis where we were able to basically point out possible early precursors to breast cancer which are microcalcifications steli and circumscribed lesions asymmetric glandular distortion all those type of things that will catch the eye of a radiology and say hey maybe we should look here and and so we put it in a smart expert system so that the uh you not only acquire the images but then you would put it in super sensitive mode and then outline the areas where the radiologists should focus on and check out and see if it it’s worth going in for a biopsy or doing something else to the patient so we were pretty proud i always tell people you know when when they ask me what’s your proudest professional moment a lot of people expect me to say well you know i flew on space shuttle discovery and went up into space international space station and all that kind of stuff i was a flight engineer but that’s not it it’s it’s the fact that you know this device that we created at lawrence livermore lab which was a nuclear defense lab yet we repurposed that technology for something uh you know that could work here uh for for the civilians was developing an x-ray mammography system that detects cancer at earlier stages everybody knows that if you detect cancer at an earlier stage the greater probability of the patient to be saved occurs and so i’m convinced that this device has saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives since its inception back in 97-98 yeah that’s i mean that’s awesome we could just end there i guess right we could just um end there but the story goes on a little bit it does in early 1992 when i was 29 years old i called the national aeronautics and space administration nasa to ask about the requirements to become an astronaut i was hoping to make myself make i was hoping to make what was a far-fetched dream for many a reality for myself here were the requirements career in a technical field or medicine check five years experience check hiring highly desirable graduate this degree check nothing prevented me from applying since i met all their basic requirements hence i decided to contact nasa much to my surprise the main operator put me in contact with astronaut selection office as part of the first step in the application process the asp net selection office sent me a 12-page application i promptly filled it out and mailed it back to nasa fast forward a little bit i finally received a letter in the mail four months after having received the acknowledgement of my application it read thank you for your interest in nasa at the moment there are many qualified applicants applying for astronaut positions with nasa unfortunately we cannot invite you to an interview for this election cycle we encourage you to continue applying for future future selection cycles so denied the first of many yeah you got denied um i’ve i well a chunk here i gotta bring i gotta bring adela into the story yes your wife um and you go through a a really cool story about how you met how you got together it’s in the book it’s great um fast forward a little bit past that it’s adele and i dated for more than two years before he decided to get married we were not in any rush to tie the knot even though we knew we were meant to be together six months after we got engaged we exchanged vows in a traditional catholic ceremony in lodi california at saint anne’s catholic church on the way to pick up adela the limousine got lost and caused her to arrive 45 minutes late to the wedding talk about a nervous groom i was starting to fear she changed her mind um true story you were sweating it huh i was sweating bullets maybe she’s bailing on you exactly uh fast forward a little bit another year passed so once again i filled out the 12-page application and waited for an answer then after four months of waiting to hear whether or not i had been accepted i received another rejection letter with the words to the effective don’t call us we’ll call you this process of applying and being rejected repeated itself every year while i continue to working at the laboratory whenever i received a rejection letter from nasa i would remind myself that there is more than just one star and one goal in life i had no other choice but to move forward with my life adelita’s positive influence helped me develop a healthy balance between work and family thus i could safely avoid being consumed with the notion of trying to become an astronaut she helped me cope with nasa’s rejections while encouraging me to sustain my dream i still wanted to become an astronaut but i also wanted to live and enjoy my life on my way to becoming one a little year a little over a year and a half into our marriage adella announced that she was pregnant with our first child we experienced our first pregnancy with all the excitement of first-time parents and all the nerves too the reason i wanted to highlight that part obviously having a baby that’s awesome but also you’re going to pursue this dream you’re getting rejected from the stream but you know you you use this term here that there’s more than one star and more than one golden knife so even though you had this goal of becoming an astronaut you couldn’t make that the be-all end-all i couldn’t let it consume right you know i i used it as a motivator as a driving force but i didn’t want it to consume my life you know i wanted to enjoy life and i and i wanted to uh to say look it’s okay if you don’t reach your goal because as long as you give it your best you know it’s like my father would always say say hey you know shoot for the stars you know but you know the worst that can happen is you’re going to be on top of the world you know and uh and so that’s that that’s that that’s that’s what i i was doing i said you know the the fact that i was driven to become an astronaut and was sort of navigating my career in sort in in that sort of way you know had it had my career on an upward trajectory so it wasn’t like they were competing priorities yeah well it’s like your son they compliment it it’s like your son he wants to be an astronaut great even if he doesn’t get it he’s got his dang phd and a couple master’s degrees he’s got all these doors open exactly exactly but that’s an important thing for people to remember like you know it’s great to have that big goal but even if you don’t make that goal look at where you got to exactly and and sometimes you are the one that changes that and all goes not the fact that you can’t get there sometimes the fact that you prepare yourself a certain way opens up the doors to other opportunities that you weren’t even aware of but all of a sudden hey i can do this now go ahead and do it if that’s you if that’s what you want to do go ahead and do it it’s okay to change midway as long as you’re going up uh fast forward a little bit during adela’s pregnancy with our second child i was traveling extensively to the former soviet union for lawrence livermore national laboratory in the u s department of energy as luck would have it i would found out while i was still in siberia that adela had gone into labor and given birth to our baby girl that’s right fast forward a little bit during one of my trips to russia i came to an important conclusion nothing in life happens or is accomplished purely by chance goals and dreams are realized through planning perseverance and hard work as i was leaning my head against the window of the state-owned car that was taking us to our hotel i thought of how my childhood dream had evolved with my graduation from college and my work at one of the most prestigious laboratories in the united states and the world it was because i worked tirelessly that i could see my transform transformative effect that my dream had on shaping each outcome in my life i also focused on bettering my physical strength and health because astronauts are susceptible to rigorous training and medical exams before blasting off into space i ran a marathon almost every year i applied to nasa with the exception of the year that i was finally selected to become a member of the astronaut class little did i know at the time i began this routine that it would mean i would end up running 11 marathons additionally i took up flying lessons at the tracy municipal airport and obtained my scuba certification through the laboratory’s scuba diving club these were skills i suspected and later confirmed were indispensable to have for an astronaut i learned many things during the time i spent enhancing my skill sets but above all i learned that patience really is a virtue it is simply the best tool to have in one’s toolbox when learning something new so you’re doing everything you can learning to fly learning a scuba dive getting in awesome shape running marathons yeah and i have to um you know i i got to give more more credit to my wife adelita because um i remember um you know once once the um i got rejected uh the sixth time and i had i had um gotten the rejection letter and i even scrunched it up and kind of i was in the bathroom uh shaving when i got and opened it and i threw in the garbage can and i missed the can it fell on the floor and you know i was i was so pissed off i didn’t rage i didn’t pick it up i didn’t even pick it up i said uh heck with it yeah and uh and my wife i guess was cleaning up that day and she saw the piece of paper had it landed in the garbage can she wouldn’t have picked it up and opened it but it was on the floor so what’s this and she sees that it’s another rejection letter and she sees it scrunched up so she’s putting two and two she’s a pretty bright girl so so she’s she knows i’m giving up and uh and and so she goes and she shows me the the letter says what’s this i said you know you know they keep saying that over 12 000 people apply for only 10 12 positions i said and man they’ve rejected me this is the six times they rejected me i said i think i’m going to give up i said this enough’s enough i said look i got my graduate degree i’m working at the lab and all that and she said so you’re gonna settle for that that what you’re gonna settle for she got you and she not only said that but then she said you’re going to settle for that and you’re a quitter that’s what got me and she said i’m a quitter i said no i’m not a quitter i said look you’re giving up and and she and she looked at me and she says you know you better think about this uh because i know you she says if you give up you’re always gonna wonder what if what if i had put on that put in that seventh eighth or ninth application and that’s gonna gnaw you from the inside and you’re gonna grow to be a bitter old man and i don’t want to be married to a bitter old man so you better think about this and that’s when she got me thinking i said you know she’s she’s right and so what i did what i did was that’s when i started doing the things that you just mentioned there what i did was i i i i sat down and i asked myself a fundamental question i said what do these guys have that are getting selected that i don’t have and that’s when i uh notice that well they have the same education they’re about the same age similar experience but then i took a deeper dive and that’s when i found out that they were all pilots so that’s when i invested in myself so i’m going to become a pilot and then another year i found out that they were all scuba diver rated so man i would drive from stockton to monterey california every weekend i got basic i got advanced i got scuba rescue master certified i want to make sure nasa knew i knew how to scuba dive so i got those under my belt and then the opportunity you know came full circle you said i was in siberia the opportunity came full circle to work with the russians remember before i was working against the russians protect us against the russians now that the soviet union broke up they were asking for help to take control of their nuclear stockpile the newly formed russian federation and uh and no one wanted to go and help the russians because from the labs because it was tough duty you know you had to travel five six times a year three weeks at a time to siberia to siberia of all places you know you think you take that 13-hour trip to moscow from new york this is after taking a five-hour trip to uh to from from san francisco to new york then you take that 13 hour to moscow you think you’re there you still got another six and a half hour flight into siberia you know talk about being in the middle of nowhere and and um no one wanted to do it but man i raised my hand i told my boss put me in coach i’ll go i said um and i said but there’s one only one condition i put he said what’s that he said well um i want a one-on-one russian language instructor because i want to learn russian because if i’m going to be doing this for a long time i think i should know the language she said yeah we got to continue education budget knock yourself out so i so i did that and i didn’t do it because i wanted to get to know siberia in the middle of winter but i did it because i had read in the newspaper that the us and russia were going to start working in the space program together and so i kind of put two and two together and i said hey we’re going to be working with the russians up in space so this is my differentiator this is what’s going to differentiate me from the 10 000 other at 12 000 other applicants is that how many are going to be able to say they go to russia they work with the russians they happen to speak russian you know those type of things and so that’s what when finally things got going and it all all thanks to you know adelita’s prodding of me and and you know and and and getting to my pride and saying hey don’t be a quitter kind of thing uh meanwhile it’s not only is she working psychological warfare on you she’s a little more after this is back to the book a little more after our second child karina joined our family my wife and i found out we’d be once again bring a life into the world and then halfway through my drive fast forward halfway through my drive to the hospital i received a call from my mother telling me to slow down and drive carefully as the new baby and its mother were doing fine mr missed another birth yeah believe me i never hear the end of it especially from the kids my family and i began to prepare to move to washington so you got a job offer up in washington it’s the same job from the lab but working at doe headquarters department of energy headquarters i started thinking about the years nasa denied my admission into their training program 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 um right before we left for washington to start my start my two-year assignment nasa finally called offering me the invitation i’ve been waiting for my entire life the person on the phone informed me that out of more than 4 000 applicants only 300 were selected for a closer look at their applications out of those 300 candidates only 100 were selected to continue on to the final round of the selection process and i was one of them we the finalists were placed in a conference room where the astronaut selection manager dwayne ross explained what we would be doing during our week-long stay he informed us that we were the third group of 20 candidates and that two more groups would be visiting the johnson space center in the coming weeks the purpose of our extensive exams was to help determine whether we met the medical requirements for a flight assignment of the 100 finalists interviewed only 10 to 18 would be selected to become astronauts so this time you made it a little closer a little closer a little closer down to the final hundred exactly from the thousands to 100 and they’re doing medical exams to you are you doing any testing like physical testing yeah yes yes they do everything from uh from physical testing to uh psychological testing aptitude testing and then uh and then they culminate everything with a hour-long interview with the whole selection committee this i was thinking this has to be the most highly screened job in the world this one i can’t imagine there’s i mean i guess maybe the president of the united states although that’s questionable yeah because they get elected yeah they’re getting elected yeah i i can’t imagine a more highly screened job than being an astronaut i mean just that’s the course and again there’s a lot of good details you put in the book about this by the book um you talk about some of the the stories of the other 19 individuals were truly amazing some were military test pilots other were helicopter pilots still others were medical doctors while the rest were engineers and scientists um eventually dwayne ross called and gave me the news jose thank you for your interest in our program unfortunately you are not selected in this interview cycle we encourage you to continue close as we’ll be selecting future classes but wait there’s more dwayne ross continued the phone conversation said jose if you’re interested we would like to offer you a position as an engineer here at nasa johnson space center however this does not guarantee that you will be interviewed let alone selected during the next election cycle if you are interested in applying to become an astronaut we suggest you get more operations experience and we believe you can gain this type of experience and knowledge here at nasa so they gave you a job offer which i was surprised when i read this but you didn’t take it exactly explain why you didn’t take it i did not take it because i had just arrived to washington dc on my change of station assignment from lawrence livermore lab the lab has spent about twenty five thousand dollars moving my family and i we had a house rented and everything uh lee signed with uh and the job was paying for it but i was working at doe headquarters um that down in in downtown washington dc and i had a commitment for two years and i couldn’t in good conscience you know after being there a couple of months say well you know i changed my mind thanks for spending that 25k i’m going to houston now i didn’t want to burn any bridges or i well not not that it was burning bridges but more than it wasn’t the right thing to do you know i hadn’t made a commitment and uh and i wanted to uh fulfill it so i i gave uh dwayne ross a call and i told him that i respectfully i have to decline the offer but i gave him my story this is this is why i i feel i cannot do it and uh and he understood uh you know i figured he i’m never gonna hear from him again because uh i turned him down but uh lo and behold the following you know couple years they they call again 1992 once again renewed my application by now i felt i could fill it out with my eyes closed for the second time i was one of the hundred last hundred finalists just like the time before these lucky 100 were invited in groups of 20 to spend a week go through a series of medical and psychological exams interviews and tours the various training facilities when nasa decides to let the hundred individuals know whether they’ve been selected or not the calls to all 100 people occur within the span of a few hours it was rumored that if a candidate picked up the phone and the johnson space center director who was george abbey at the time was on the other end it would be good news however if it was the astronaut selection manager dwayne ross or any other interview panel member one could almost guarantee it would be a thanks but try again type a call true to the rumor when i received the call from duane it was to tell me that i had been seriously considered but it was not my year he then went on to suggest that again i consider an engineering position at johnson space center so then you go and talk to your wife adelita say may i talk to you for a moment she said of course something wrong he said i want to talk about something really important i have thought about the whole situation with nasa a lot but before we finalize our decision i want to confirm something with you we’re getting ready to head back to california and i’m probably going to get a promotion and a nice raise when i report back to work at the laboratory that said i think it is best job i think it’s best for me to turn down the job offer with nasa because they offered you another job yes houston is hot and muggy anyways we’ll have less money to spend and adelina interrupted me honey if moving to houston and working for nasa as an engineer is what it will take to for you to make your dream come true then we’ll move to houston in a heartbeat boom yeah and that was the deal yeah so now you now you accept the job um at nasa as an engineer as an engineer not as an astronaut it’s still really cool yeah i’m i’m in engineering yeah and low man on the totem pole um on january 21st 2003 we welcomed our fifth child second baby boy into the world a few days earlier on january 16 2003 at 9 39 a m the space shuttle columbia took off for its scheduled mission with seven astronauts on board columbia was scheduled to land back on earth on february 1st 2003 at 7 15 a m the orbital maneuvering system engines were turned on for a de-orbit burn this burn allows the atmosphere to capture the space shuttle columbia and thus begin its re-entry to earth within minutes the temperature sensor on the left wings breaks began to show an increase in temperature it was the first serious indication that something was wrong at 7 59 a m the last words from the space shuttle columbia were transmitted understood uh but three minutes later columbia broke apart raining a field of debris across the northwest parts of texas and louisiana you use a term in here um it’s it’s normalization of deviation and and i started thinking about that term and what it means and how how it obviously have impacted this horrible incident with losing the space shuttle columbia but it seems like something that we a mistake that we something that we can do in our own lives this normalization of deviation can you talk about that a little bit what caused the accident and what how that idea of normalization of deviation played into it sure well but by that time i had been there for three years at nasa and i worked myself up to branch chief of the materials and processes branch and this is the engineering branch that does the failure analysis and finds out root causes of failures of materials and and so when the uh space shuttle disintegrated up in northwest texas louisiana um you know my group was one of the first groups that were out there picking up the pieces we were the ones that put the hanger in florida and outline the shuttle and brought every piece and forensic evidence and put it all together and did the testing in terms of the materials to find out where the breach occurred and once we were pretty certain that that’s where the breach occurred which is on the left wing leading edge which is a reinforced carbon-carbon substrate hard substrate we we went to southwest research in san antonio and we built a full-size wing of the shuttle and then we looked at the image analysis and saw pieces of foam that fell from the tank insulation that big orange tank center tank that fell and hit the left wing leading edge we found out we calculated the speed the size of it and we replicated that experiment at southwest research through a air gun fire that those pieces of foam to the wing leading edge and recreated basically the the cracks that occurred because that’s the material that helps uh on re-entry you’re up to about 2700 degrees and you know um the aluminum structure inside it’s aluminum melts at about 900 degrees or so so if there’s a crack in there it’s gonna get in there and it’s gonna affect the structural integrity of the wing and that’s what caused it to snap and create that catastrophic failure and pieces all over northwest texas occurred and and and so um so during all this time you know the um the president uh had the columbia accident investigation board or uh board uh formed and since i was the the branch chief i gave a lot of briefings of the findings uh you know there’s a whole teams hundreds of hundreds of people that contributed certainly not me myself but i i was one of the spokespeople in terms of telling the science part of it uh the results of how what we measured and all that and and and so i got a lot of face time with a lot of people at nasa and they ended up you know they started looking at me and trusting me and all that that that that uh you know we came up with the with the story of how what was the root cause of the failure which is of course the piece of foam that they did and um but shortly thereafter the following year they have a selection um a selection of astronauts and i’m again one of the finalists and this time when i sit down across the 18 people that are there you know i know more than half of them through this accident investigation board uh franklin chang diaz is sitting there he’s one of the guys so it’s kind of like i come home to family now before it was a complete set of strangers and now everybody knew me i knew them and i think my work spoke for itself and uh and i think that’s what finally did it but unfortunately you know we had to lose a space shuttle for that to occur i mean then it’s kind of like a bittersweet moment for me with the normalization of deviation explain that that term it’s like where something goes a little bit wrong and you go you know what it’s not it’s not that big of a deal it’s like a normalization of of issues yes what happened was um in in in that sense we’ve had debris fall off the tank in the past um and our engineers would cry wolf they would say hey something happened here and we don’t know what’s going to happen on re-entry and you know they would do that three or four times and you did see pieces but it didn’t hit anything and so everybody so wait so they weren’t really crying wolf they were actually saying this could cause a problem but nothing ever bad happened exactly nothing ever bad happened but but but the fact is the fact is that when they cried wolf when it really did happen because they had normalized that occurrence then the powers to be didn’t put enough weight behind it to say let’s stop and let’s go out do an eva and let’s inspect the wing leading edge where it hit because that’s that should have been the proper response all right and uh and that didn’t happen and so that’s why i call it normalization of deviation yeah it seems like well the way i thought about that after reading it was thinking about just us as human beings in our lives and we make a little mistake but we get away with it right and then you me or you go you do something that you know you shouldn’t do but you get away with it you don’t you know you go and eat a donut well you know that’s just one doughnut then you look up in a month and you’ve had a bunch of doughnuts and all of a sudden you got a problem and you got five pounds on you right so we got to be careful of that that idea um discipline what a travesty that was um to get to that point you were just talking about in the fall of 2003 the selection process for the next wave of hopeful astronauts opened once again i turn my updated application the fact that i work for nasa did not guarantee my acceptance and they made sure i understood that when i accepted the job at nasa in 2001 working at this is this is a beautiful point although i was anxious for the selection process to begin i can honestly say i was content and at peace with where i was in life if i was not selected to travel into space i would accept that since i was happy working with nasa working at nasa made me realize that space flight involves tens of thousands of people and that every single person is as important to the success of the mission as the seven crew members aboard the space shuttle so you realize that and that was a you know yeah i worked in the trenches with everybody and so i had the opportunity to appreciate what um with the dedication of everybody because you know when i went to work there you know i took a 10 pay cut from lawrence livermore lab because i made too much money at the lab so so uh you know that that was one part of my hesitation of accepting the job that my wife convinced me and said hey don’t worry about it we’ll make it happen and and so so so so from that perspective you know that’s the the the point i’m getting at is that the people that work there can make more money elsewhere but they love their job and they’re doing everything possible and it only took me uh you know when i s when i was part of the whole process of the accident investigation and i saw the dedication of everybody and then uh in previous to that when we were preparing for launches i saw the dedication of people during their normal activities and so a lot of people always told me when i got selected in 2004 and said are you crazy i said the space shuttle just disintegrated last year and you just got selected aren’t you afraid and i said no it says because i know these people i know there is tens of thousands that we depend on but i know they’re here because they want to be here you know they’re gonna dot their eyes and cross their t’s because these are dedicated folks i mean i had first hand working with them in the trenches uh and i know their dedication so i was a peace of mind when i jumped into my space shuttle i was i was more than confident things were going to turn out good uh when going for going fast forward a little bit when the whole interview process ended i along with 99 other aspiring individuals had nothing to do but wait about four months later i received a telephone call while working in my office frankly i was prepared for the response that i knew all too well however this particular call did not come from the center director or the astronaut selection manager dwayne ross it came from a senior manager colonel bob cabana who is in charge of the flight crew operations directorate and who was an astronaut himself i knew that if the center director was calling it was sure to be good news when somebody on the recommendation board like bob was calling i really did not know what to think i was puzzled he started the conversation with the usual salutations and then went on to ask if i thought i was replaceable as head of the materials and process branch my response was genuine when i told them that i thought everyone was replaceable and that all along i had taken upon myself the responsibility to mentor and train folks to be ready to take my place good he said how would you like to come work for the astronaut office i quickly realized i had been accepted my whole body went numb the second i heard the good news i did not know how i was going to be able to hold the telephone without dropping it a nervous laugh escaped my lips but no words came out as i listened to bob continue speaking now jose you cannot tell anybody beyond your immediate family about this because it will be announced at a press conference on may 6 at nasa headquarters in washington d c warned of the voice at the other end of the line i agreed said goodbye and hung up i did not tell anyone anything i still had four hours before i could go home from work and i could not think of anything else but telling my beautiful wife adelita she had to be the first to hear the good news followed by my kids and then my parents the 10-minute drive home seemed to last an eternity adelina adelita guess what our opportunity has come finally i got accepted i’m going to be an astronaut there it is yeah how many so how many total times did you apply uh it was the 12th time the 12th time yeah 11 straight years of rejection exactly and the 12th time there you are 12 times the charm uh nasa press conference took place i still had to keep the big news a secret from almost everyone at 11 a m my fellow astronauts and i were brought face-to-face with the press we were all nervous and careful of our every step as we walk single file line just like my siblings and i had when we entered the house after coming home from school when the cameras and microphones were directed us i remember thinking to myself i’m an astronaut not a famous movie star my palms were sweaty and there was nothing i could do about it we were introduced one by one satcher cassidy arnold dutton and hernandez and cassidy’s a seal and he was in your group huh yes he was my classmate good friend of mine oh that’s awesome um our first big training assignment involved traveling to the naval air station in pensacola florida once there we spent six weeks going to ground school being taught water survival techniques learning how to co-pilot the t-34 airplanes ground school involved not only learning the basic principles of flight but also putting those principles to work in high fidelity flight simulators probably the most interesting activity during the six week training program was the one where we went on submersible device that simulated the fuselage of a helicopter this device is actually known as the helo dunker so you when you get picked up and when you get picked up for the program you’re still not an astronaut you have to make it through how long is that training program two years this astronaut candidate program it’s two years you go through a lot of academics you go through the learning the systems of the space shuttle 18 you know a typical airline has about eight or nine subsystems an airline plane the space shuttle has and you have to learn each one of them you have written tests on each one of them then you got single system trainers so you master each one of them then you got multi-system trainers where they start cross-pollinating the systems and how one system affects the other and then you’ve got the high fidelity motion based simulator where then a pickup crew of four of you are in the cockpit and they throw everything but the kitchen sink at you and you’ve got uh you know it’s either an ascent run or is it an orbit operations or it’s a landing and but they’ll fail things for you and you got to figure it out and you got to pass all that every friday there’s a test uh it’s like being in finals week for two continuous years i mean pretty intense but i mean i’m sure it’s similar to like for seal training as well that that you have to go through all these things but it’s not only you know it’s academic mental physical uh the whole combination of things where they really stress you and and you know that’s how they figure out you’ve got the right stuff if you’re able to survive that then then you move on you get your wings and now you’re eligible for a flight assignment how many people that get selected to enter the pipeline the two-year pipeline how many people don’t make it you know it’s very rare that a person doesn’t make it because they’ve been filtered so filtered they’ve been filtered uh you know the book says four thousand that was when it first began but when i was in uh and that’s my twelfth try we were up to twelve thousand uh this past time selection run they were up to eighteen thousand applicants so they filter it pretty well uh including the psychologists that filter everything that you know when they uh when they select you you know that they have a high probability 99 9 that you’re going to make it because you’ve been filtered you’ve been tested aptitude testing psychological testing stress testing so they have a feeling that you’re gonna make it so but you still gotta do it yeah no that’s the the impression that i got when reading this also talking to johnny kim and is that if you get selected they’ve already they’ve already figured out because the thing that’s interesting to me is you talk about you’re putting these failures failure situations over and over again and you know there’s people that panic in those situations there’s people that lose their cool in those situations there’s people that don’t know how to handle themselves that’s why i think it’s interesting like just because you became a pilot well if you panic if you become a pilot you learn to get control of your emotions and not panic and same thing with scuba diving right if you panic while you’re scuba diving if something goes wrong you’re going to have some real problems with some problems so those are things that they’re looking at your application going well he’s a pilot so we know he’s at least going to be able to detach from his emotions though oh he’s a scuba diver so when things get interesting not claustrophobic so there’s they have all these things in line so that you can you have a very high percentage chance obviously you could have some kind of a medical anomaly or something but that is the i do i’m curious i’m sure people will give me feedback if there’s a more highly screened job than an astronaut and i know you just gave some props to seal training i could tell you uh there’s all kinds of knuckle draggers and see what i’m probably cased case in point you know exhibit a uh that that what we go through is more about just being wet cold and miserable but um so uh fast forward a little bit once our two years of training and testing were over we held a small graduation ceremony at space center houston kent rommel the chief of the astronaut office said a few words before presenting each of us with a silver pin with the astronaut logo on it this is a symbol used for astronauts who have yet to travel into space a gold pin symbolizes that an astronaut has already flown on a mission so you get the new guy symbol exactly but it’s an important symbol because you’re now eligible you’re in the pool of eligible astronauts when they select a new crew you could be one selected whereas before you were just an ascan astronaut candidate you couldn’t be selected to train for a real mission now you you’re eligible to get assigned and meanwhile you talk about that you have so once you once you become an astronaut and you’re not an ass can anymore i’m using that that’s a good one once you’re not an ass candidate you’re an actual astronaut then you spend 20 of your time sort of focused on training and simulations and getting ready to fly a mission eighty percent of your time is work yes and your job was a cape crusader exactly tell us about the cape crusader yeah we call them c squareds uh because that’s cave crusader two c’s c squares um it was great i was a great job um you know two weeks before launch you and three other buddies a group of four astronauts you know you fly over from houston to florida where the birds at the shuttle and you start prepping the vehicle for launch so you start prepping the inside and doing testing with ground control and everything so you get everything ready for the mission and then um and then uh the day of the launch then uh if you’re the lead c-squared then you get the number seven on you know how you see all those white tech quote technicians the number seven is always the astronaut there’s always there’s always an astronaut there because he’s the one that buckles the their fellow astronauts into uh the cockpit of every uh every mission and unfortunately your face is the last one they see before they go up into space yeah and so so uh and i did that a couple of times um you know i for four like uh for like two years i participated as a c squared but during the last part of those two years i got i was the lead uh c-squared because that’s how it usually happens is the lead guy first you’re the new guy and then you’re the middle guy and then uh you’re the expert and then you get assigned so you move out and then so the middle guy becomes the expert and so that’s kind of like a fifo first in first out kind of thing uh you become an expert by lieu of your experience but then you get assigned to a mission and so that’s what happened to me i participated about seven launches during those two years and the last two i was the lead c square and uh it’s great because you go there two weeks before you’re you’re in crew quarters uh so you you spend time with the astronauts you know they arrive about a week before the launch so you spend time with them uh before they’re going to go off to their mission you’re debriefing them on the status of the bird and how things are going and all that kind of thing any questions they have and then uh the day of the launch you know you go out there with them and you’re out there strapping them in and getting them ready and then it’s pretty neat because you’re also part of the rescue crew so you’re in the closest the absolute closest part you can be to watch the launch i mean you feel where where you physically where are you you could feel uh one of the bunkers you can feel the heat you can feel the heat of the exhaust you know because it’s so close i mean it’s dangerously close so you’re sitting there in a bunker yeah with uh with a bulletproof glass or something right exactly you can watch how far away you think you are from it ah let’s see i would say about a mile mile and a half maybe and you can still feel the heel oh yeah you can feel you can feel the heat and uh but it’s just amazing i mean that launch that you go out i mean it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s crazy when you see it take off and you can’t believe that big heavy piece of metal is going to take off and yeah there it goes i was going through navy boot camp so this is september sometime i think it was either september and october of 1990 and i’m in orlando florida going to boot camp and i’m standing at parade rest out on the out on the grinder and there was a space shuttle launch and we said you know sat there and watched this thing go up in space yeah yeah it’s a quite an uh image isn’t it even from that distance yeah very cool um meanwhile going back to the look my wife adelita had just opened up a restaurant in houston down the street from the johnson space center on the corner of saturn and gemini in the clear lake area so she’s just getting after it going and opening up in a restaurant she always had a dream of opening up a restaurant you know she grew up in the same socioeconomic conditions i did her parents are from mexico and uh she was born over there because she was born in november okay christmas elsie would have been born here but she was born over there and uh so she came up with the same upbringing i did and um and so her dream was always to uh own and operate a restaurant and so uh once i got situated i got selected i i was jogging one day and i found this place that was for rent and i took her i said how about here it’s only a couple blocks from the restaurant so we opened it it’s called it was called uh tierra luna grill and tira luna means earth moon but my buddies uh astronaut buddies didn’t call it earth moon because terra is also dirt so they call it dirt moon grill so let’s go dirt moon grill eat and so that would be the hangout for the astronaut studio but i remember the very first time i um i went out there as a c-squared uh adelita had just opened up the restaurant and so imagine this you know we get up at three in the morning um and so i go and prep the vehicle uh and then i go and and and astronauts arrive about six o’clock so so we we then tuck them in into this into the space shuttle you know close the hatch secure everything do our leak checks everything works out we go out to the muster area for the rescue area and um and we see them blast off and that was my first that was the first shuttle i seen in person launch and i was that close and so it takes off it takes off and this is about 9 30 now so as soon as it takes off there’s nothing for us to do so what do we do we hop on the on on the t38 jet that’s right there that we had flown in from houston and we go back to houston ellington field and ellington fields about six miles from johnson space center so and it’s still mid days i said well i’m not going to go home now i said i could go back to the office so i’m driving to the office but on the way is adelitas restaurants i want to go get some lunch get some dirt moves yeah let’s go go dirt moon grill and get some lunch and plus i want to tell delita the whole exciting uh what i saw oh cause that was your first one so i’m over there so excited and you know because i flew on the t-38 over the gulf over the pond landed so there i am telling adelita you know how i flew the t-38 jet we’re back how i saw the space shuttle you know to think that the space shuttle i was on the space shuttle at three four five in the morning and uh now it’s up in space and my buddies are up in space and she’s just kind of like what looking at her watch and so she wasn’t even paying attention to it yeah exactly it’s kind of like the teacher from charlie brown right and uh and and so i i i kind of i say hey what’s wrong i said oh nothing i said well you know maybe you can help me i said sure what can i do i said do you have about an hour hour and a half to spare i said yeah i probably can i’m not no one’s expecting me back in the office so yeah i got an hour and a half spare so like my dishwasher didn’t show up today would you mind you know this is the busy time the busy time is coming it’s close to lunch would you mind washing the dishes for me for just about an hour and a half just till the rush goes over and i’m still in my blue flight suit get some yeah so i put on an apron and i i you know roll up my sleeves and there i am you know spraying beans and rice off the plates and cause it’s a mexican restaurant you know and all this stuff and she walks in and and i said you know i tell her i can’t believe it it’s at three in the morning i was in the most sophisticated piece of machinery that humans could ever had made and then i was flying a t-38 jet across the pond the gulf of mexico i landed it here and what am i doing right now i’m washing freaking beans off of that plate and she just looked at me i said but you’re doing a damn good job the most overqualified dishwasher of all time probably the only uh probably the only uh dishwasher ever to take a t38 jet to work exactly and that’s so so that’s uh you know it humbles gotta stay humble the family humbles you the family yeah and i’ll tell you the other story that you you i didn’t tell you also that has to do with the blue suit too is um which one was it my fourth daughter my fourth daughter i mean the fourth in line third daughter the youngest daughter of them all i remember when i got selected as an astronaut well they gave you that blue flight suit right and because it has your velcro name tag here and everything the nasa meet paul logo and all american flag and all that kind of stuff it looks pretty cool so they give it to you so i bring it home you know the first day they gave it to me so yeah i want to try it on make sure it’s the right size they gave me and all that so i put it on my wife has a full dress mirror in the bedroom right so there i am i’m putting it on you know it has zippers galore everywhere right zippers here zippers here zipper series efforts here zippers on the legs and zippers down the pant legs and all that stuff so i’m playing with them getting to know and then you know posing kind of doing my best you know hero shots kind of thing you know hey i’ll be true i was kind of you know i was you know flexing kind of thing you know all that kind of stuff and then my my five-year-old daughter walks into the bedroom the door’s open and and and she’s kind of like yeah look she was younger she was four years old because i remember she she still had her little you know kind of the maggie uh yeah and she’s looking at me like this and tilting her head one way tilting her head the other way and i said ah she’s gonna see me in my blue flight so she heard you know because we’ve been talking that i became an astronaut and this that she’s going to go and she’s going to hug me and say hey papi i’m so happy you’re an astronaut and all that that’s what the reaction i think she’s going to happen when she sees me i didn’t get embarrassed that she saw me posing because yeah she’s little if it was my wife i would have been a little intense but she was a little kid so i so you know i said hey mikhail how you doing and she’s still turning her head and then in between the pacifier and everything you know she points at me and she says you look like papa smirk so from then on it became whenever i want to look for my suit i said where’s the smurfs because when it’s in the laundry or something i said where’s my smurf suit i need my spur suit and so you got to stay humble the family will give you help [Music] exactly uh you going forward a little bit you say everything seemed to be going according to how i ideally imagine it would when i was a kid working in the ruts and groves of the fields though my life seemed in order there was a certain sense of emptiness there was no reason for me to feel this way since i had everything i’d ever wish for out of nowhere i heard my mother’s voice saying what is the purpose of having goals in life working hard for them and achieving them if you cannot share them with others even though i was sharing this moment with my family and friends i was still not completely enjoying the moment or myself this was particularly true after coming to stockton to speak at a school i felt the excitement my visit generated when i shared my experiences with the elementary school children but then when i returned to houston for training it felt as if i had never visited stockton something was missing something that would give that would that could give continuity to my visits during this time my friends and colleagues had called or emailed me to tell me what a positive impact my selection as an astronaut had made in the stockton community that was when the idea hit me why not start a foundation that capitalizes on my role as an astronaut and allows me to inspire kids to do well in school so therefore um angel piquan am i saying that right and patty tovar two of my great friends friends helped me start the legal framework work for establishing a non-profit organization called the jose hernandez reaching for the stars foundation angel and patty put together a board and helped me define the foundation’s mission which is to inspire kids to dream the impossible and to emphasize that through education anything is possible and you say i do not believe in just pointing out a problem and expecting the government to solve it on its own i would like to think that this is the responsibility of every person in the united states and that the private sector and foundations such as mine should take some ownership for resolving this issue and that issue is getting more kids into specifically stem stem science technology engineering and math fields yes so you got that foundation started we’ll talk a little bit about that at the end sure um you asked to see me sir i said as soon as i walked into mr steve lindsay’s office mr lindsay was an active astronaut and the chief of the astronaut office he was a very intelligent and slender all-american air force man whose grade hair grade haired head stored a half centuries expert experience and knowledge yes jose please have a seat he told me politely i’ve called to inform you that you have been selected to form part of the crew of the upcoming sts-128 mission in about 15 months you will be at the international space station we will announce the names of the rest of the crew members at our all hands meeting this was something that i had longed for and wished for my entire life it was the preamble to my dream come true my dream had been actualized i found myself one step closer a significant step closer to flying into space i thought finally my time has come the big day yes you got told it was a go fast forward a little bit here we go as the launch date approached it became harder to sleep i tossed and turned for hours until i was finally able to sleep soundly part of the reason i was not able to sleep was because i kept thinking about what could possibly go wrong during the mission what if something fails what will happen to my family how will my wife kids and parents handle it those thoughts disrupted my tranquility luckily though as the date approached there was no time left to worry about anything but the mission our crew began adapting to a new schedule going to bed at 8am and waking up at 4pm we were forced to shift our sleep cycle because those were the hours we would be working on the international space station the closer we got to launch date the more lucid our mission objectives became our first objective was to transport a new crew member nicole stott to the iss and then return home with another astronaut tim copra who had already spent more than two months in space second we had to conduct three spacewalks to replace one of the station’s ammonia-filled tanks last we had to make an attack take an italian-built portable laboratory called the multi-purpose logistics module affectionately called leonardo we also needed to bring back to earth about a ton of equipment and waste no longer needed aboard the iss with all that said we had only 13 days to complete our three mission objectives so you got a schedule heading up there a heavy schedule they’re not playing around they’re going to get their money’s worth out of you exactly um fast forward a little bit and i’m going again look you got to get the book if you want to get the details of what’s going on and it’s it’s really fascinating to hear you know what you’re thinking about as this progresses and all the things that you’re working on on the things that you do as a team look i’m skipping over a bunch of stuff but what you do as a team to kind of come together as a team the seven person group that you’re gonna be working together all this really incredible stuff uh again i’m not doing an audio book here buy the book if you wanna know what happens yeah there’s a lot you’re skipping oh yeah of course um um so i am skipping to this part here we arrived at the launch pad and entered the elevator to go up the 192 foot level where we had access to the shuttle’s hatch a walkway allowed us to approach the white room that was next to the hatch it was in this white room where we put on the last of our gear before entering the shuttle and getting strapped in by the closeout crew one by one we were called in to take our seats fast forward members of the closeout crew exited the shuttle the hatch was shut and closed it was then that the closeout crew performed a cabin leak check and then disassembled the white room to clear the launch pad during the last hour before launch i sat strapped to my seat on the flight deck a million different thoughts rushed through my mind fast forward a little bit suddenly i heard the countdown reach the nine minute hold that is when the final systems checked are conducted by the launch control center it was almost time make your final adjustments and prepare for takeoff we heard cabin revision complete manual’s ready seconds before launch the bottom of the launch pad was sprayed with water in an effort to cushion the noise and vibration as a result of the power dissipated by both the three main the three shuttle main engines and the two solid rocket boosters everything was going to plan until pete nicole nicolenko the launch director informed us that the weather conditions were unfavorable 50 minutes later our mission was aborted due to local thunderstorms in the florida skies so close so close ouch a few hours later a new date and time was announced for the discovery launch wednesday august 26 2009 this was a 48-hour slip the mission management team who had set the new launch date obviously did not share our optimism about the weather improving within 24 hours as we woke up on wednesday we found out that it was not going to happen then either we discovered a defective fuel control valve which is being replaced at the moment we pushed back the launch date again for 11 59 on friday august 28 2009 nasa informed us that reminds me of you know when you’re on an airplane at the on the tarmac and first it gets delayed and then it gets delayed again and all of a sudden they go hey we found a maintenance problem next thing you know flight gets canceled or deboarding keyboard and that was a legitimate there was a chance that you wouldn’t if this got rolled a little bit more there would be no launch at all that’s right so this the whole thing is in jeopardy yeah but was that faulty fuel valve would would that have been a problem that’s um you know the thing that we don’t know you know we’re kind of lucky the weather was bad yeah because uh you don’t know if that faulty fuel valve would have acted up during that launch right and uh and once we shut things off and then started back up we got that indication and we replaced it so you know it could have been that the weather saved us could have been just never know luckily on friday we once again found ourselves sitting inside discovery ready for takeoff with only two and a half hours to go i knew it was only a matter of time before a button was pushed and we would be well on our way into space the nasa team in houston was confident that the third time was indeed a charm suddenly in the blink of an eye the countdown clock was set into motion after having reached the 9 minute hold we could hear the countdown nine minutes five seconds four three two we closed our helmet visors as we heard the three main engines light up shortly thereafter we felt the gentle vibrations of the engines about two seconds later as the countdown reached zero the noise level increased in a magnitude and the vibrations grew more violent the two solid motors attached to the side of the external tanks it had ignited just as i thought the whole shuttle was going to shake apart or fall to one side i felt a lot of pressure on my back i heard zero take off through the corner of my eye could see the tower staying behind as we lifted off we were on our way immediately the muscle memory of our training simulations took over i quickly focused on my job as mission specialist two which was to execute the role of a flight engineer i began reading off the predetermined milestones to our commander and pilot while monitoring the screens and gauges in the front and above me to ensure none of them would deviate from their expected readings the most dynamic parts of our mission were blast off and the subsequent eight and a half minute flight into space during the latter we went from resting on the launch pad to orbiting our planet at more than seventeen thousand five 500 miles an hour at an altitude of some 280 miles two and a half minutes into our launch the two solid rocket boosters separated and fell to the ocean about 200 miles northeast of the kennedy space center after the initial two and a half minutes the next six minutes became quieter and the ride became a lot smoother when we reached 8 minutes and 30 seconds into the flight we had reached the main engine cutoff this basically meant that we had reached our top speed of 1000 or seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour and it turned off our main engines the next step was for us to monitor the separation of the external tank which was feeding our three main engines the external tank typically ends up so high that it does not survive re-entry into the atmosphere and thus disintegrates into pieces before falling harmlessly back into the ocean the shuttle usually possesses enough energy to continue upward and when appropriate begins orbiting the planet soon after this happened to us we approached we reached a microgravity environment and began floating in space high above the earth our mission was well on its way when that thing starts to rumble well how’s that feel where that thing starts to go you know i’ll be honest with you jacob is is that you know if there was any piece of fear during this whole process of being an astronaut i would have to say it’s probably the first three seconds of when you reach zero and you feel the three engines light up and then you feel the two solid rocket motors turn on come to life all of a sudden things are vibrating and uh you know this is the type of stuff that can’t be simulated here on earth and so you don’t know what to expect and yeah at that moment you you you know the first thing i said is jose what did you get yourself yeah but then shortly after that as the book indicates you know muscle memory takes over and you know we’ve done a bunch of simulated motion-based ascent runs as a crew and uh and so i focus on to my test sec at hand you know i had the best seat in the house because i’m sitting a little aft of the two pilots the commander and the pilot kevin ford and my my commander cj sterkow great marine pilot and uh and and kevin ford is an air force pilot and i’m sitting a little behind them in the middle so i get the panoramic view but you know of course i have to hawk all the 10 screens of both pilots so that if anything goes off nominal i peel off with the person that owns the system and me as the flight engineer you know i’m the one that’s basically quarterbacking what the problem is diagnosing what we need to be doing and between the pilot and i we solve or try to minimize its effect while the other pilot flies the nominal portion of the mission and so uh so but nothing happened it was the best similar i always tell my commander this was the best simulation run ever because nothing happened everything occurred as it was supposed to occur unlike our simulations where they throw the kitchen sink at us and and so uh but man you know words can’t describe those eight and a half minutes of powered flight because you know you start off like the greatest disneyland ride ever and uh and then as you as you move up the two and a half minutes when the solid rocket boosters pop off it becomes smooth a more smooth smoother ride more quiet ride but you start accelerating more and you start feeling the pressure against your chest so you end up feeling about up to uh it goes almost up to three g’s of force right on your chest and that’s three g’s is about um what is it uh three people that weigh exactly like you on top of you that’s how three g’s feel so i at at the mark of eight and a half minutes you’re ready for this to be over you’re ready for main engine cutoff miko and and because when that happens you stop accelerating so that 500 pound gorilla disappears and now you’re kind of loosely goosey in your seat but you got your seat belt on but now you’re in a microgravity environment orbiting earth once every 90 minutes on a continuous basis 17 000 miles an hour 17 500 miles an hour you’re traveling but because now you’re not accelerating you don’t feel the g-forces so now you’re it’s kind of like being on a plane going 500 miles an hour you don’t feel that uh you only feel the take-off kind of thing uh and and so yeah so you know it’s it’s it’s crazy because you know when you look out the window and you see the us you go off and do something for 20 minutes and now you’re flying over china or australia or over europe kind of thing it’s it’s uh it’s the craziest uh feeling i’ve ever had it says wow this is uh this is a good way to travel yeah that’s uh as you’re describing that both in writing and then you talking you’re sitting on a freaking bomb on a bomb that’s what you’re sitting on all that stuff just wants to explode and it’s just control yeah it’s a little bit it’s a controlled detonation yeah that’s what you’re on the top of that and you’re on top of that puppy um once you get into space you go into this this schedule of all this stuff that you that you’ve gotta do and right you you you detail it in the book it’s it’s a great read one thing you you had a little case of nausea while you’re up there a little bit like seasickness yeah they call it sas space adaptation sickness so it makes you feel a little nauseated uh you know one of my crew members lost their cookies i didn’t uh i actually lost them on the way back which is a 1g re-adaptation uh but but but uh on the way up uh one of my crewmates did uh get get sick to the point they you know they had to throw up but uh but it goes away you know after a day or so that feeling it’s kind of like being in the back of a bus and going up a mountain curves and all that you kind of feel a little carsick nauseated but then it goes but then it goes away yeah um fast forward a little bit day three we’re about 183 meters away from the international space station our shuttle began the 360 degree rotation for the purpose of being photographed using high resolution photography and video by the station space station crew they take pictures from the spa from the space station of the space shuttle just to make sure there’s no damage on liftoff but that’s got to be pretty weird to be up in space and you’re 183 yards away from this other big chunk of metal traveling at 1700 [Music] yeah yeah yeah but that was one of the new um procedures as a result of the columbia accident that we put is that uh we would you know before we dock to the station we would reach a certain distance stop do a holding pattern there and then we would do a maneuver where where we would show our belly to them and as we’re showing our belly they’re filming everything of course uh downlinking it to the engineers down on the ground looking at that leading wing edge and any other type of things that other damage that could have occurred to your tps system which is your thermal protection system which is the underbelly and the wing leading edge of the of the shuttle that we uh we investigate inspect uh the the docking you call it a collision in here it’s like it says a collision or soft dock that’s got to be crazy too you’re aiming the space shuttle at that thing and you’re going to like connect yeah you’re going to connect and i’ll tell you um it was even kind of crazy a little bit more crazy for us than normal because um you know nothing real big happened in terms of malfunctions during our mission except this one thing and um the shuttle has um built-in jets to maneuver in space including the ohms engine orbital maneuvering system those are the big engines that we fire to slow down so that we can get back into the atmosphere but we don’t use those for docking we have built-in jets that are on the nose the tail and near the wings of the um of the shuttle and they fire to maneuver in space and um and we have two types we have the regular called rcs jets reaction control system jets and then we got the verniers which are the fine-tuning jets they’re kind of like the small ones they’re one-tenth the thrust the big ones and so when as you as you’re docking to the station you use the rough ones the rcs and then as you get in you switch to the fine ones so you could do the fine tuning so that you can dock because the uh the pilot the both pilots have are at the controls i’m at the station as flight engineer giving them uh and they’re using they have a target so they have a camera system so they’re looking at at the camera one’s looking outside and then i’m looking at the screens giving them speed uh i i giving them a distance uh and and then also whether they’re in plane or out of plane in terms of i give them numbers to indicate that if if it’s all zeros it means they’re coming in plane and then if it’s a different number i give them so that they can provide some type of correction and they’re doing all that but as i mentioned as you get closer you switch over to the fine jets which move you very little but our fine jets fail so there’s no vernier jets so we got the big honking uh rough you know coarse jets that we can do so now our our our commander cj sterkow the good marine he is you know when you when you move a a vernier jet you know you move very little but when you move when you do the regular rcs jets it goes like that right and so what he has to do is he’s looking at the at the approaching speed he’s looking at the at this but now he has to time his firing so that when he fires it as it goes it hits at the middle and uh and we practice that during uh during because we practice everything so we practice so we’ve done that before but the fact is that you know that was probably one of the uh uh pucker moments we had in saying geez oh we would get this right because if not you you you could damage the docking mechanism you could get stuck or or you could just bounce off kind of thing so but but he did well i mean like the good marine pilot that he is yeah uh you get docked um sleeping up there that sounds like it’s a strange experience you gotta like tie yourself into a sleeping bag basically exactly you what happens is you got to tie the four corners of your sleeping bag to structure and then you gotta slide in and you zip yourself up there’s the uh the the sleeping bags have holes so you can stick your hands out and the weirdest thing is you don’t need a pillow because your your head doesn’t bob right there’s no weight yeah your hands whatever position your hands are that’s how you’re sleeping you know i got these cool frankenstein pictures of my crewmates like that because that’s the way you sleep i mean whatever position you’re in you’re gonna sleep in that position but i’ll tell you it was the weirdest feeling going to sleep the first and second night but after that i said you know this is the best sleep you can ever you know no tempur-pedic mattress nothing mattress mac in houston can sell with respect to his mattresses uh this is the best sleep you can get because you got no pressure you have no pressure points what’s the what’s the how many hours would you get to sleep for you get to sleep up it was on the average about six hours and 10 minutes somewhere that’s what my uh my sleep thing said about six hours 10 minutes um day eight you got this in here the eighth day of the mission was very special one for me jose the interview is set up and ready you have four minutes and 30 seconds to do it i was told i was delighted to hear carlos a famous mexican reporter who had been following my story for some time truth be told i was terrified at the thought of knowing that millions of people in latin america were going to see my interview it was only after i returned and conversed with him that i found out he felt the same way this was a historic interview as it was the first live interview from space conducted in spanish the minutes went by so quickly that i felt my time was up just as i was getting started we we talked about the view of mexico from space including the attractive coast of the state of quintana roo and the yucatan peninsula we also spoke about my inability to detect borders that divide earth into countries there are no borders from what i can see up here our world leaders should see how beautiful and precious our world looks from this perspective i said to the reporter one world from up there huh yeah you know um interesting story there jackal with respect to what happened after that you know i i basically uh said you know the the most beautiful thing there was two things that two takeaways the first one had to do with what you just mentioned is that i was able to see canada the us and mexico but what struck me in awe and that’s so beautiful is that we couldn’t i couldn’t differentiate where canada ended the us began or where the u s ended in mexico began and and this aha moment i said man i had to go out of this world to come to this conclusion that down there we’re all just one because borders are human-made concepts designed to separate us and how sad because from my perspective we’re just one down there and it’d be great to have our world leaders give to give them this opportunity because i’ll assure you our world will be much better now the thing that what the news got out of all this when i came home and you can look up the new york times and the l a times came up with the headlines saying a mexican american astronaut wants to open borders that’s what they got out of this my story i say good grief yeah but yeah everything has to be politicized they want to get people to click on those headlines exactly and uh and which i found it so sad because i said yeah i wasn’t even talking about that i was just talking about the concept that we’re just one down there you know and uh but somehow from there they got the fact that i wanted to remove all borders and get let everybody come into the u s what can i say that’s the uh that’s the media for you yeah um so again i’m gonna i’m gonna skip forward you gotta read the book to get some of these details about the flight day 14 on this day we made our final preparations to begin the deorbit procedures this included closing our payload bay doors and once again putting on the orange les suits for the entry phase of our flight observing the beauty of the earth from space was something i have not been able to put into words well not in a way where i have felt i was able to truly do justice to this spectacular view i felt goosebumps knowing that few people have had the privilege of looking at our planet from my perspective i marveled at the blueness of the oceans the whiteness of the clouds at one point i was able to make out the lights of some cities i can see san francisco mexico city and houston i managed to steal a few more moments for myself while i while the rest of the crew worked without anyone noticing i made my way over to a corner and pulled out the crucifix that adelida gave me and said a prayer let us lord see your love in the world forgive us for our wrong doings give us faith to trust in your goodness forgive our ignorance and weakness give us the power to continue trusting wholeheartedly and show us what we can do for peace on earth amen and you guys end up spending an extra time up in space an extra day yes the weather was not cooperating in florida and flight rules are that if it’s uh if it’s more than uh a couple of rotations around the earth and you still can’t land you postpone it for 24 hours and if it’s still bad weather you go to your second preferred landing site and so you got your second preferred landing site which was california yes edwards air force base not too far from here yeah yeah and which was kind of nice because you were going to land in california but also your family wasn’t going to be there yes yes my family was waiting for me in in florida because they were they wanted to witness the landing in person and of course uh once it got canceled they didn’t have enough time uh to fly and meet us over here at edwards air force base but i kind of liked it because you know it’s california and i’m landing at edwards air force base i call it poetic justice because it’s uh it’s some 80 miles from chino ontario where i used to pick strawberries so here i am coming in with a uh you know in a nasa space suit a good old american flag on my shoulder coming in as a u s nasa astronaut uh when you know 40 years ago i was you know over there picking uh strawberries man uh this landing was no joke too i mean you describe it here as each minute past the distance between our shuttle and earth lesson the planet also grew bigger in size before our very eyes which meant that we were getting closer to home in my mind i was counting down the minutes until we were safely on the ground our landing point at edwards air force base in california was a mere dot on our map as as discovery darted across the sky at high speed i saw in our instruments that we broke mach 25 at that point we were traveling at slightly more than 25 times the speed of sound i could feel the buffeting of the shuttle with the atmosphere and i noticed an orange glow outside our windows we were definitely in the atmosphere now i noticed gravity gravity slowly taking its effect as the weight of my helmet attached my orange les became heavier at about 26 000 feet we broke through the cloud layer and i had a good view of the ground both below us and in front of us by now the shuttle had the characteristics of an airplane as the aerodynamic surface controls were responding to the commander’s input the shuttle slowed down to normal airplane speeds and behave more like a glider would since it did not have an active propulsion system during the landing phase of the flight this of course meant we only had one opportunity to land it our commander and pilot had practiced these landings hundreds if not thousands of times in simulators and in actual approaches utilizing one of the two planes that have been modified to be able to fly the shuttle’s landing profile at 400 feet with the gear already armed our pilot kevin activated the gear down command this poised the wheels of the shuttle for contact with the surface of the pavement at edwards air force base in preparation for landing the landing strip was ready in no time soon thereafter we were literally racing down the landing strip until the parachute deployed and the pedal brake slowly brought us to a complete [Music] stop the opening of the shuttle doors reminded me of the times i had to open them to welcome back the returning astronauts however this time i would be welcomed and indeed we were welcome back i was told by one of my class colleagues as he unbuckled my seat we patted one another on the back once i was able to stand up i exited the shuttle with a smile on my face the seven of us crew members were beyond ecstatic everything went as planned our mission commander began to congratulate us and said we did it we couldn’t have asked for a better team all of us had to spend an extra day on the base before we were able to go home as i waited for the moment when i could go back to houston i could not fathom the irony of my dream going into space space both beginning in and concluding in the golden state as a boy i dreamed of becoming an astronaut as i picked crops as a man i would exit the shuttle as an astronaut on a landing strip located just a few miles from where i grew up picking strawberries it was poetic really there was truly this delightful symmetry to my life that helped me realize the importance of remaining humble and remembering where i came from epic um and and the story goes on here you go on to talk about retiring from nasa uh going into the corporate world as an executive you you let me tell you a little bit about the retirement uh part of it it was a hard decision to to uh go about and uh and deciding jacob because um i’ll tell you i remember when we got back when we got back from um from space shortly thereafter they announced the retirement of the shuttle fleet so they were going to retire the whole space shuttle program i think they had four or five flights more manifested and then after that program is over and uh but they had them all assigned so because they assigned about four or five crews ahead because they’re training already for the next flight or they’re going to get ready to train and so i knew you know since i just got back i’m in the back of the line right of the queue so i knew i wasn’t going to get assigned another mission but then i was one of the prime candidates uh what we were going to be flying is uh when we were flying already was with the russians all right we paid the russians 50 million dollars per seat and we go up on the soyuz um and and they’ll take you to the station uh so so i was one of the prime candidates because of my background of traveling to russia for five years and knowing russian and all that and i thought i i thought okay well i’m going to be one of the first ones i’m down for that i’ll do that but then you read the fine print and um you read the fine print and and what you don’t realize is that the training in russia it’s a three-year training program and so 80 of the time you’re in russia and it’s not continuous it’s like you go six weeks you come back one week you go eight weeks come back one week you know 12 weeks come back two weeks kind of thing like that for three years and and then you go up for six months continuous and then when you come back you go on the road for six months continuous uh divulging everything all the science you did so and all in all it was a four-year ordeal where you were going to be gone about ninety percent of the time eighty-five ninety percent of the time from home and i got five kids my oldest at that time was 15 years old and the youngest was about seven years old and so i did the math and i said you know all these kids i’m gonna miss you know they’re you know they’re in boy scouts there’s softball baseball proms high school graduation uh you know this 15 year old’s gonna be a 19 year old already off in college at least i assume he’s gonna go to college i’m not gonna be around to find out or to guide him and so so quickly i think my hispanic culture kind of kicked in and and and i gave a lot of weight to the family and i’ll tell you man it was the hardest decision in my life because you know we just got through reading what it took to get here to get there to get assigned and to be part of nasa and after flying only once here i am considering chucking it all away because i could fly again but you know i kind of just thought about it prayed about it uh i didn’t want to talk to my wife about it because i know her answer is we can do it we can do it i didn’t want her to convince me i said you know this is uh you know there’s there’s a fine line where you know you do it for what you want to do for you and then that fine line of being more egotistical than you know not considering other folks and uh and so you know i thought about it thought about it and finally i said you know i think the best thing for me to do is to just leave give someone else an opportunity you can fly i mean i could stay and not fly but i’m taking up a building i said that’s not fair either i said i it’s probably best for me to leave and give someone else it says give the johnnies of the world a chance johnny can the seat exactly give give the johnny kim’s of the world an opportunity so they can fly and so it was the hardest decision uh that i i that i could have uh made but you know i look back at it and i look at where all my kids are at in life right now all college graduates my youngest seven-year-old is a freshman in mechanical engineering at uc merced uh you know the phd my three girls have their bachelor’s one of them is finishing her masters in may and uh one of them is a big uh influencer in uh in in in tick tock you know okay and if you guys really want to have a laugh uh because i come on a lot she films me a lot uh go at the vanessa hernandez okay and you’ll see you’ll see her you’ll see me make a fool of myself but you know anything from my daughter you know but you’re not doing tech talk dances are you or are you oh you got to look at it man all kinds of stuff i’m telling you all kinds of things she graduated from so you truly will do anything for your family exactly tick-tock dance she graduated from loyola marymount and she works for a vitamin pharmaceutical company uh near la jolla maramon so she still lives in the la area and uh but she’s been she’s been you know doing social media stuff and uh she’s gonna start her own podcast too that they already contacted her before the start but but she’s been doing good on tick-tock i mean she she represents a few companies and tick-tock and she’s i think she’s banking more on than she is in her day job you know and working a lot less so but but yeah but it’s those decisions you know that i think uh uh you know i i really uh you know i look back at it and i don’t regret it because i look at how my kids turned out because i’ve been here for them and i continue to be there for them and uh and so i think i made the right decision yeah well that’s uh definitely a a difficult decision to make i know i was in the military and that’s the the decision that military individuals like myself have to make at some point are you gonna keep going you gonna keep going on deployment yeah you’re talking about missing all those things i missed all those things i missed everything you know and eventually had to say uh i owe it i owe a little something i’ve done what i can for the country i owe something to the family that i’ve left behind for months and months and months and months at a time so that’s i agree the that’s you know people ask me what’s the toughest decision you ever made in the military and they think i’m going to say some tactical situation or some mission it was like no deciding to get out was the thing that i thought the most about and it was the hardest decision i had to make and then people tell me well didn’t you know you’ve gone in why did you go in the first place i said no that the rules were changed midstream i mean they decided to retire the space shuttle fleet i mean i i thought the space shuttle fleet you know they told me it was going to be going on for another 10 20 years and i would have got another three four flights under my belt but when you take that away and they say hey the only game in town now is with the russians for the next 10 years i figured you know i think it’s time for me to leave then if you guys change the rules and i value my family as much as i do and i think they need me at this point in their life pre-teenage teenage years i mean that’s the most important part of the kids growing up stage and you know i think it’s a job where both parents have to be present and you know thumbs on on them to make sure that they just like my parents were with me make sure that they’re you know on the straight and arrow go heading in the right direction yeah yeah um and then you ended up getting a job in in the in the corporate world um you end up running for congress yes yes i get i get i get uh i i i get uh convinced well they convinced me to run for congress and it was uh it yeah that’s a long story in itself too but but it was at the urging of uh president obama you know he he sought me out not once not twice but three times and when you get sought out the third time and your commander in chief straight out tells you the first two times he says you ought to consider it and the third time he said he he told me and i quote i’m gonna make the ask i said please run for congress in california so when the commander-in-chief stares at you in the eyes and says run for congress what you do you salute the flag and so so i did you know i gave it my best we we were they didn’t put me in my district because my district is i’m a democrat so my district is a heavy democrat but we already had someone there that had seniority so why why knock off a seniority level democrat and put a freshman there why not go after a republican seat so they sent me next door at the time they were plus 11 in registration and we lost by one and a half points so we almost made it but but it left a bad taste in my mouth you know i can’t imagine the taste that left in your mouth yeah politics you know it’s kind of like you know i just don’t have you know i have the stomach for a lot of things but but when it’s stuff like that it’s kind of like there’s no rules and you know there’s scruple i mean it’s just like no ethics at all and i said you know that’s not me so one shot was enough at that one i think for now never say never never say never jackal but uh but but for now it’s it’s it’s uh i think i’m doing okay where i’m at right now yeah um now you need to go around you know you do speaking events right now and and you talk about that a little bit here and i want to close out you know we’ve covered some of the book but i wanted to close out the book with this this little section where you talk about what you talk about you say i share with everyone the magical recipe for success that i applied to my own life it is a recipe that i learned from my parents and i also shared here with you one identify your goal in life two realize and understand how far you are away from that goal three develop a road map to get there don’t skip steps four get yourself a good education consistent with your goal five develop a good work ethic and put your heart into reaching your goal six and this is the one you added you mentioned earlier exemplify perseverance never give up on your dream and remember that it is the journey not the destination that is of most importance then you continue on these are not the steps to become an astronaut these are the steps to harvest your own stars the recipe works for anyone in any part of the world and trust me it’s infallible so that’s what you go around talking about yes i’m a motivational speaker and i i share my story and uh also that recipe and and talk and talk about what what you know what it took to get there and like a good engineer i try to try to um basically capture it in a formula type of environment like the uh recipe that you just read off there i also give a three element strategy that says hey to reach your goal you know you’ve gotta you’ve gotta and this i learned afterwards right is is is you got to know what the minimum requirements are once you define your goal is natural tendency and 99 9 percent of us get this right is you ask yourself uh what are the requirements to get there you know you want to be a doctor you know you got to go to medical pre-med medical school and pass the boards lawyer pre-law law pass the bar astronaut you know you gotta go to the stem field get graduate degree uh four or five years experience and then start applying so that’s the first one everybody gets that one you know it’s it’s no the requirement second one is emulate successful people that you want to aspire to be like in other words you know ask yourself what do they have that i don’t have you know if you want to be a ceo study a ceo and study find out how they got there you want to be an astronaut study an astronaut i mean that’s what i did after my sixth failure remember i compared myself i found out they were all pilots so what did i do i invested in myself i became a pilot then i found out they were all scuba certified what did i do i invested in myself and became scuba certified the third stage of that of that uh of of of that strategy is is you gotta create a differentiator in other words differentiate yourself from differentiate yourself from the competition you know at the time you know it was from 4 000 and went up to 12 000 uh that i had to differentiate myself so it was no accident that i took that job going to russia it was strategic in my career i said it’s going to help my career obviously but it’s also going to help me over here because you know i just read that the us and the newly formed russia signed an agreement to build what was going to be the international space station so it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out even though i am one no you are one even though i am one but i didn’t take a rocket scientist figure out we were going to be working with the russians so my great differentiator is during these next five years in this project i traveled more than 25 times to the russian siberian countryside and worked with the russians and all this you know helped me get the upper hand on the other 14 12 000 applicants because very few of them could save or claim similar experience than what i had and at least that got me in the door to start getting interviewed and then the rest i would just sell myself so yeah so that’s the three element strategy that i add up up to that and so that’s what so that’s what you’re doing now now you got your foundation the reaching the stars foundation yes at astrojh org if you go look at it astrojh org you’ll see everything we do in the central valley where we try to motivate kids to get interested in stem careers science technology engineering math we have a summer academy at the university of pacific same school i went to where we have uh kids from the 7th to 12th grade in the six week summer program where we uh basically inundate them with stem concepts fun stem concepts that they can take back to their school and uh and and and get a head start in their uh math and science courses they’re going to see the following year so we we basically expose them to those concepts that we know they’re good we know what the core curriculum is so we expose them to those ideas in a fun experimental experiential way uh so that when they go back to school they say oh yeah i’ve seen this it’s my fact i know the experiment and so they do very well and so we we do that for them and then uh and then we we also have a science blast where we get uh over a thousand kids in the fifth grade to uh in a one-day exploratorium type of environment where we have all kinds of hands-on experiments we have people from lawrence livermore lab from google from apple come and they talk about what their careers are and basically uh you know expose them to stem careers and why we do that at fifth grade because that’s the age when i decided i want to be an astronaut so i think if it’s good enough for me it’s good enough for them and then whatever monies we have left over because we we sort of uh have on a year to year budget whatever moneys we have left over we give scholarships to the kids so no that’s awesome i know um the you know that’s what america needs america needs kids that are growing up that want to learn stem yes we need lots of engineers and scientists yeah that’s that’s the that’s the competition for the future chinese and chinese are all india are kicking our butts and producing more scientists and engineers than we are and that’s going to cost us 10 years from now 20 years from now it’s going to cost us if we don’t if we don’t rectify the situation yeah i know i i can find myself sometimes being pretty down on the academia right for people that are going to the debt and they’re they’re borrowing all this money to go to college but they get a degree that doesn’t really give them a job you know they’ll get a degree in something that doesn’t you can’t go you don’t have a skill set i mean engineering is a skill set it’s something that you learn something you know how to do so the fact that you’re doing that that program is leaning kids in the right direction for something that can actually provide not only them with a good career but also provides america with something that we desperately need and we’re definitely going to need even more in the future and on top of all that you also have a winery right well well first of all you know all that is just volunteer you know we i get i get nothing out of it right except but i feel good but you still have to put it together yeah yeah yeah it’s a time sink yeah right right unpaid time saving what i’m saying on top of all the time you spend doing that and all the time you spend speaking you also but before the winery i also have a uh a engineering consulting business first yeah i have a tira luna engineering uh where i do aerospace consulting if you know for example i helped mexico uh buy and launch three communication satellites from boeing corporation that was a 1 2 billion dollar purchase for mexico and uh and they hired me because uh the under secretary of communications was uh he he himself admitted he says look i’m an economist a politician economist i know diddley squad about satellites and here we are spending 1 2 billion dollars uh can you help us so i worked on a neat project for about four years uh helping them launch three communication satellites so they uh it’s they can have internet throughout all of mexico any population over 5 000 the government put a dish so they would have connectivity to the outside world which is uh which is pretty neat so i do that um you know i’ve i’ve also helped a university build a cubesat small satellite 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters and with nasa we launched it for free for them and they became the first university in mexico to have built design and keyword operated their own satellite from space so we did that for them i’m helping i also created an a aerospace curriculum for them working with a three campus university in northern mexico and that’s tira luna engineering which by the way if you go to the dot com store there tier luna engineering dot com you can actually get the book reaching for the stars you can get the children’s book there and you can buy an amazon and quite frankly you could probably buy it a little cheaper but if you buy it through our website you’ll guarantee that i can sign it and dedicate whatever you want me to say on it i’ll dedicate it and the proceeds go to my foundation so that’s why i want to make sure and clarify that you know i think it’s like 30 bucks for the book or something like that but it’s signed by me and uh and we send it off and uh and so you can do that at terelunaengineering com and then as as as as um as if that wasn’t enough i kind of come full circle and uh my wife wanted a back to the field exactly my no my wife wanted a home out in the country and so about five years ago you know when we were well down established back in stockton i started looking for some property because yeah you know happy wife happy life right and so i started looking for the property so that we can build a house out in the country because she wants to live in a country and i said yeah okay i’m i’m a country boy too and man i saw the price and they were expensive and then i ran into this 20-acre vineyard and it was income producing and it was only about twice as much as an empty three acre lot in the country i said man that’s a no-brainer i’m gonna i’m gonna become a farmer back to the fields and i became a a great uh farmer and the reason why i was so into it was because first of all i know how to pick grapes but that’s the only thing i know i don’t know diddly squat about about running a vineyard but you know who does my dad my dad’s worked in there all his life and so i told pops that’s what we call him pops i told pops hey if i buy this vineyard would you teach me how to run the vineyard you say yeah son so these past five years with him you know he’s 84 strong man it’s good you know field work background he’s strong and healthy you know this best five years i spent with him quality time he’s teaching me uh you know what to fertilize how to fertilize uh when water and you know he gets up on the tractor and he plows and mows and all kinds of stuff that he does helping me with the with the vineyard and and and and we sell all the grapes to a winery that makes uh a champion well sparkling wine can call it champagne here in california sparkling wine that’s right and it’s um it’s it’s it’s corbell so we sell it to them but then they make the mistake of one day inviting me to see their processes and i saw how they engineered mine starts going to work exactly i started looking at the process of how they make wine and you know my favorite phrase is hey this ain’t rocket science i can make this i can make this probably more efficiently too exactly exactly and so so i started you know a couple years ago started working with my own formulations and making my own wine and finally i settled on three concoctions that that we have and uh and so i started my company again everything under tierra luna members tier luna engineering remember my wife’s restaurant it was called tira luna grill yeah when we came to california and i opened up tierra luna engineering i handed a dollar to my wife so what’s this for i said i’m buying your naming rights of your now defunct restaurant because uh you’re over here you closed it down here here’s here’s the dollar i’m going to call it luna engineering and then after that i open uh another company called tira luna sellers that’s with a c c e l l a r s sellers dot com com and then uh that’s where i i sell my wine now uh this is the first year we came out with it it’s a direct to uh consumer uh and hopefully we’ll end up being in stores and stuff later on when we are production but we’re right now we’re sort of just getting it out there and getting it known and uh and we have you know we have three varieties you know we have a sauvignon blanc which has my grapes so if you want to drink wine from my vineyard you’ll see that the sauvignon blanc is the one to go and then i buy grapes from lodi and i make a red zinfandel which is also good and then i buy grapes from uh from the napa area and i make a red blend that’s a combination of uh of merlot uh tempranillo syrah and petite syrah so i call that the red blend and then i named them after constellations because the the the company is called tier luna sellers but like the first one i ever made was with my grapes so i call it uh new star which is nova stella okay uh in in in latin nova stella and then uh and then the uh zinfandel i call it stella z you know z constellation and then uh and then the red blend i call it stella roja which is a red star right and so uh so so but but yeah you know it’s it’s a great uh it’s a great activity i enjoy it you know it’s kind of like another challenge that you start from nothing and you create the labels you create the formulation and all of a sudden you got this nice bottle and say you know i’m the one that created this this is so cool and so so so it’s just enjoyable i i love doing this i love doing this yeah that’s uh man you’re just getting warmed up i guess i guess so yes yes and and then and then to top it off you know my son my youngest son i told you he was going to uc merced right um he got accepted to university pacific and he got accepted to uc santa barbara amongst other schools but the three he liked was uc santa barbara um university pacific and uc merced and i was certain he was going to pick pacific or santa barbara but he picks uc merced and i told him why son i said why did you pick it’s fine i said you go wherever you want but i’m curious why did you pick your mercedes he said well these are the schools that are student-centric in other words they don’t focus too much on research but focus on the students and success and so i liked all these three schools i said that but why some merced they said well the tipping point was in pacific uh it says my brother and you are alumni i said yeah that’s true i said and at uc santa barbara my sister and you are alumni i said yeah so so you know i’m going to always be known as you know the brother the sister or the son of saying i want to come and form my own my my you know create my own uh route i said well i respect that i said that’s fine so the friday saturday we were supposed to move him in all right uh and this is a few months back when the semester was starting we were supposed to move him in the storm and everything and but the friday before one day before i get a call from the governor’s office and says uh you’ve been appointed as a uc regent so now i’m at uc regent you know overseeing the 10 uc campuses uh the national labs lawrence livermore lab is falls under my purview also so so so we go the next day saturday i thought nothing i said oh thank you very much i appreciate yes i accept and all that so the following day i go and uh with my son and my wife and there we are moving him in and as we’re moving him in along comes the chancellor his assistant the the photographer he’s taking pictures with my son and i cause i’m the new regent you know and uh and my son looks up well he looks down on me because he’s taller than me he looks down at me he says i’m never going to get rid of you am i no you’re not so so i’m also on the uc board of regents impressive man impressive um well look we’re going on i think over three hours right now three and a half yeah three wow time flies doesn’t stop it does indeed is that that’s probably your typical interview anyway right yeah yeah around three something between three or four yeah yeah something like good i’m glad i had enough material to at least meet the the norms here you met the minimum requirements all right i met the minimum requirement it’s just it’s it’s a fascinating story and it’s just unbelievable to hear gary you got any final questions just an incredible story uh thanks you know thanks for sharing all the lessons from from your dad and from your story i mean it’s just incredible man thank you yeah oh the one thing miss young remember i told you not to let me forget oh yeah i was just about to remind you okay don’t worry all right yes yeah good good i’m glad i’m glad you reminded me i’m just kidding i forgot i’ve dropped the ball uh with miss young you know one of the things is uh when you go off on the mission uh you get to invite a hundred people in the vip section that’s about you know about five six miles from the launch pad so that’s pretty close too and for a hispanic family it’s like okay which of my cousins aren’t coming right we’re so large but but but thank god i had caucasian crewmates that didn’t have quite a hundred relatives so i was able to siphon off wheat i was able to siphon off a bunch of tickets and so i had the school district look up miss young and miss bail now i couldn’t look up mr sandejas because he passed away in a car accident uh but but i the three most important teachers and also uh mr rodriguez he also passed away of cancer so two of two two of them were gone and um and and so i looked them up and i had them invited and flown uh they were sitting next to my parents both miss bao and miss young were sitting next to my parents uh witnessing in real life there the launch of the space shuttle and uh and the impact that they had on me you know i thought that was uh kind of only right thing to do and try to get them out there and have that experience with us man outstanding outstanding well um you know again thank you so much thank you so much for joining us um thanks for sharing your story thanks for sharing your experiences thanks for sharing your lessons learned unbelievable lessons learned and and thanks for what you’ve done for mankind to you know not only in the medical field and then in the final frontier of space and then on top of that what you’re continuing to do right now with your foundations um trying to get out there and get kids pointed in the right direction you know we talked about what happens when kids get pointed in the wrong direction we know how that turns out it’s horrible and to see someone like you that we’re able to overcome those boundaries and overcome the ultimate boundaries and make it to where you’ve made it just so much to learn and i just want to say thanks for coming on and thanks for sharing we appreciate it well thank you very much and i noticed you have a twitter too right and so i want to invite people to uh to to uh get into my twitter which is astro underscore jose so if you guys come and follow me and uh and you’re on instagram as well yeah that instro underscore jose yeah on twitter at under astro underscore jose and then once again the foundation is astrojh org yes and then tierra luna engineering luna sellers that’s where we can find you we can we can either launch satellites or we can have a glass of wine you got us covered and if you drink enough wine it’s probably both thanks jose appreciate it thank you jacob it was great being here and uh thank you for the time and uh and you were yeah you’re very generous with your time and i’m glad we were able to uh go over my story and i hope folks enjoy it and like i said if they want to get some more buy the book and uh and read it i think it goes well with a glass of wine myself you got us covered thanks jose all right thank you and with that jose hernandez has left the building man very cool unbelievable story everything full circle with that guy everything amazing man just incredible story uh obviously he set a high bar on a long journey i always come out of these things thinking to myself well i better raise the game i better raise the bar i better do a little bit better i think that’s what we i think is what we all need to do okay dog what do you got how can we raise the game what do we need to do what do you got for us so we’re we’re raising the game on a strategic level and a tactical level right at all times strategic level tactical getting it right check this out so i’m gonna start tactical though and that’s jocko fuel for me rtd go and it can need that hitter tactical solution right but it doesn’t stop there yeah it it serves the the greater goal too right the more strategic goal which is staying on the path staying healthy not polluting my body with sugar and freaking chemicals chemicals preservatives additives right so we’re doing both here with the uh the jocko fuel or uh jocko go rtd cans shack getting after dog ready right now you spent all night thinking of that didn’t you nah bro speak i i just cracked this go about 20 minutes ago in it it came to me when we were talking uh to jose man yeah you know he was always he was always moving making little tactical moves that were serving that greater vision um and even you know even when it came to when he was talking about retiring you know that strategic vision was still you know taking care of the family he had achieved that that highest goal and now the the vision was to take care of his family make sure they were good to go let’s just rock and roll now it’s thinking strategic at all time and you’re right and i sort of talked about this with that idea of the of the deviation right and the acceptance of deviation and how one minute you’re like yeah you know what it’s just one doughnut and you just start to accept that you start to accept that you start to accept it don’t accept it don’t accept it you gotta stay on the freaking path you can’t accept these deviations from the path you gotta get and if you deviate look if you deviate get back on it so that’s where we’re at yeah get you know get get something that’s good for you you can drink something that’s literally good for you you don’t have to drink something that’s poison for your body which seems cra it seems crazy that in this day and age we have to tell people hey you don’t have to poison yourself but people the the companies that make this stuff have figured out oh we can get people addicted to sugar we got them addicted to the rush that they’re going to get and that fake dopamine hit that they’re gonna get and it’s all lies and it’s literally bad for you you might as well just go and just just hit up the local freaking drug dealer and get some of that meth going that’s where you’re at that’s what you’re doing to your body that’s what you’re doing in your mind don’t do it instead get something that’s literally good for you 100 and and i’ve got i’ve got friends who who are addicted addicted to energy drinks and in thus addicted to everything that comes along with that energy drink and it is it can lead to catastrophic failure right productive we we don’t want to do that so jack i go rtd we also have joint warfare uh super krill oil uh disciplined powder we’ve also got the new pre-workout got that in the sniper flavor great feet and i’ll just just straight just just drew in the dry what do they call it dry scooping dry he’s dry scooping that and now i’ve seen other people just drive chasing it with a cell phone so legit um so yeah get get that stuff the joint warfare the super crew it’s that’s how you’re gonna had a sealed buddy of mine call me the other day he goes hey bro i gotta ask you a question he’s my i went through buzz with this matter of fact and he he was like uh are you sore every day or is that what’s going on i go hey man you got the i go you got joining warfare he goes yeah i go you got super cool he goes yeah and i go and you’re sore and he goes yeah and i go well quit complaining yeah like there’s that’s as good as you’re going to get like you’re saying you’re getting a little older but you don’t want to go off that stuff got to get that if if you’re still sore bro if that’s that muscle soreness the doms get on that mulk train get on where are you at so we got we got uh by the way speaking of mulk i just got to mention this yeah it’s hot milk season cause it’s winter time even here in california look even here in california it gets a little look it’s a little cold a little cooler in the morning time right so you gotta and this is the key point is you gotta warm the milk first don’t put milk in milk and then warm it up you gotta warm the milk then put the mold in i’ll do an instructional video as we approach this i’ve never done hot milk oh bro whoa it’s like hot chocolate but it’s good for you so yeah stand by for that instructional video you’re good to go uh yep so get yourself some milk whatever flavors you want vita vitamin d three there you should 100 beyond that for your life same thing with cold war oh oh it’s it’s winter time there’s germs around cool just crushing with cold water we’re fighting back on this side on the side all day long uh look you can get this stuff at vitamin shop you get all of it at vitamin chop you can get the drinks at wawa go get a wawa just just clear the shelves you can also get it from jackalfuel com and if you subscribe to any of these things which is a good call on multiple fronts first of all it’s a good call on the health front because now you don’t wake up sore and broken because you miss joint warfare you don’t go to bed with a with a craving in your stomach because you didn’t have any mold left don’t let that happen just subscribe and that’s one front health front other front is financial front if you subscribe to something we’re paying the shipping homes we’re here for you get that free freight get that free freight going on so there you go uh another thing that we’ve got is well we got origin main origin usa originusa com we’re making stuff you see my post the other day we’re making stuff we’re making jeans we’re making boots we’re making geese for that jiu jitsu we’re making sweatshirts hats well just what what you need what that’s what you what what you need rash guards what you need we’re making it we got a safety tow boot now we got work heavy duty work pants just what you need and it’s all made in america and it’s not just made this is the thing i’m i’m big on this right now the made in america thing not not just made in america but what origin is doing right now in america bringing manufacturing back to not just maine now but north carolina too where where origin is in north carolina is 30 minutes from where i grew up that’s huge man to know that down the road there are kids in my hometown right now that can go get a job at origin are you freaking kidding me i’m fired up now i’m kidding you not just made in the usa originated because the material originated in america the workers originated this is american made and it’s how we’re gonna win the economic war absolutely so there you go check it out originusa com get some stuff get some stuff oh wait it’s christmas time get some stuff for christmas hey what if you could get a gift for your friend family member whatever you could get them a gift and you could give america a gift of support what if you made their future better because you bought something that was american-made i’m just saying the option’s there you don’t have to buy something from a communist you don’t have to do that you can you can you can but you don’t have to jack jack called me out in austin straight up saw my jeans wasn’t wearing oh it wasn’t damn yeah what he was like he was like hey you know we got a company that makes those in america i was like oh it burned me up right so i got full benefit from that black friday deal at origin tell you what delta 68 is inbound check all right so there you go originusa com go get some uh we also have our own store jacostore com we’ve got the discipline equals freedom shirts on there rash guards t-shirts uh hats beanies uh it is officially a hoodie season yeah i think we can all agree when you’re going hot monk you’re in a hoodie season 100 hoodie season squat season that’s what we’re doing uh we’ve got hoodies there we’ve got women’s gear we’ve got warrior kids soap made by aiden out there getting after it irish oaks farms jocko soap out here staying clean we’ve also got the shirt locker uh my brother echo charles making who my brother echo charles the big boy is that the other guy that’s here sometimes echo charles is making a new shirt every month and they are certified legit shirts uh certified legit we were just at the jocko live saw you know troopers out there with the warpath shirt on with the jocko riding the tank i mean just all of all of these awesome shirts get on the shirt locker again subscription situation there so subscribe to this podcast on itunes google play stitch or wherever you’re listening to um leave reviews man they are hilarious and jocko reads them and they’re awesome yeah sometimes sometimes they’re just cool you know good but sometimes they’re funny i haven’t done a i haven’t done a review in a while i’m reading one of those i need to get back on that train also we have the jocko unraveling that i do with my friend daryl cooper dc we have the grounded podcast which we haven’t recorded in a long time is that thing dead what are we doing you know we need to get it undead yeah we all are doing jiu jitsu we talk about i just need to hit record got a jiu jitsu shirt yeah yeah we got two g2 t-shirts on jacquardstore com so we’ll get back to that grounded podcast we have the warrior kid podcast for the warrior kids out there we also have jocko underground com as you know look there’s situations where we we have been banned in certain scenarios we don’t like that at all i probably got banned today possibly because i told people to get off their phones and get get off fight the algorithm fight the algorithm how happy do you think that algorithm controllers are when they hear that i bet you that thing gets beat down and freaking alarms going unmonetized yeah they have like freaking alerts going off in in brain control mind control brainwash central they’re like hey we got a rebel here we need to put down yeah they’re fighting fight against the algorithm so look we don’t know what’s gonna happen we push against the algorithm hard enough algorithm’s going to push back they’ll push us right off but guess what we’ll be okay we’ll be standing by at jockowunderground com where we have we have a little oasis set up it costs eight dollars and eighteen cents a month but if you can’t afford it that’s okay email assistance at jockowunderground com and and we do a podcast we do a separate podcast on there kind of like as a thank you it’s a thank you q a answer a bunch of q a talk about some other subjects that are tangential to what we talk about on jocko podcast but most important it just is a contingency in case something goes haywire and we have to abandon the major platforms it’s okay we’ll be in jockowunderground com you can also find us on youtube um jocko podcast youtube channel subscribe there got some uh great videos up of the podcast where you can see what jocko and echo so look when echo can you explain that when i talk about being the aed and kind of coming through at the critical moments and and see what echo’s doing the good tactical move he’s made it seem like that’s funny ha ha he was like he went with that to make it seem like yeah jackal is just kidding because he doesn’t want he doesn’t want to say the truth which is as you know at the critical junctures at the critical junctures there’s usually a little bit of like you know that that little connective tissue right hey look echo brings he brings the major bulk of the of the muscle mass to the scenario but that achilles tendon you got it i’ve got to get rid of it so the assistant director myself let’s face it sometimes i got to come in with a big win i’m you’ve seen it i’ve i’ve seen it but i will also say i will also say that echo charles is open-minded in these scenarios he’s straight up luckily he’s humble enough and he knows he doesn’t push back when that when the when when when the assistant director comes in and makes a suggestion echo charles is humble enough to say yeah jacob’s right again open-minded open-minded for sure but we so we’re we’ve got those videos up on our youtube channel origen also has an amazing uh youtube channel where they show you what it’s like to bring manufacturing back to america uh check them out on youtube as well we’ve also got psychological warfare which is an album with tracks of jocko helping you out of moments of weakness um highly recommended there that’s the fundamentals you want to get reps in on the fundamentals go hit psychological warfare i owe another one of those albums by the way i know totally yeah all right i gotta prioritize and execute that uh if you want something cool to hang on your wall don’t worry dakota meyer’s got you covered cool stuff to hang on your wall which is all you need to say comes from dakota meyer and it’s cool stuff to hang on your wire wall check out flipsidecanvas com order something for yourself made in america by the way also got some books final spin to get i i can’t say too much about it but let’s let’s face it if you haven’t read final spin you want to you probably need to go get that go get that there you go there’s your advice leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocols discipline equals freedom field manual weigh the warrior kid one two three and four that’s what i’m trying to do kids are out there they need those books they need to be on the path they need to get steered straight unlike carlos and alberto and sergio that you heard about on this podcast today get the kids on the path weigh the warrior kid one two three four there’s christmas there’s a life-changing christmas is that a bold statement no it’s not actually life-changing christmas get way of the warrior kid one two three and four for all the kids that you know make an investment every kid that you know get them all four of those books change their life get them on the path if you got little kids get them miking the dragons best little kids books ever extreme ownership dichotomy of leadership that i wrote with my brother leif babin don’t forget about about face by colonel david hackworth i wrote the forward on the new edition we have a leadership consultancy it’s called echelon front we solve problems through leadership no matter what’s going on leadership is the solution leadership is the solution go to echelonfront com for details there you can also come to one of our live events we have the muster we have field training exercises we have ef battlefield we have the next muster is in dallas texas march 24th and 25th if you want to come and get some of that we also have an online training program called extreme ownership academy leadership is not something you just learn and you’re good it’s not like that it’s something that you have to train in constantly it’s something that you have to work on constantly it’s something that you improve on all the time it’s a perishable skill by the way so that’s why we created the extreme ownership academy go to extremeownership com i’m on there three times a week two times a week four times a week answering questions you want to talk to me if you’re like oh i’d really like to meet y’all just go on there that’s that’s the other thing about this leadership skill is that it helps to have a guiding you know a guiding hand a mentor you know somebody who knows what they’re talking about helping you along the path you guys do that three times a week uh you and leif you know on a live event uh you know jp dave are the echelon front instructors guiding you through this stuff i mean it’s a no-brainer yep that’s it go to extremeownership com come and hang out come and learn and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their families gold star families check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she’s got a charity organization doing all kinds of awesome stuff for veterans if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america’s mightywarriors org and if you want well if you want more of my um what is it marathon mumbling which is what i seem to do if you want more of carrie’s inquisitive inquiries well then you can go on the interwebs on twitter on instagram and on facebook carries at carrie underscore helton i’m at jocko willink and also don’t forget that astro underscore jose is where you can reach jose hernandez and also he has the reaching for the stars foundation astrojh org so you can check that out as well and then as you heard him say he’s got tira luna and tierra luna sellers tiaralunasellers com tierra luna engineering was an engineering engineering of tierluna engineering com if you want to get some help getting into space or you want to drink some wine jose’s got you covered which is awesome and for all those men and women out there right now in the army navy air force marines thank you for keeping us safe here on earth and also thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thanks for keeping us safe here at home and to everyone else out there remember remember jose hernandez his family give us an incredible example of what hard work and persistence 12 years of persistence by the way persistence can do for us and he gave us a simple plan to follow identify your goal identify where you are in relation to that goal map out a way to get there educate yourself thoroughly around that goal put in the work people don’t want to hear about that step put in the work working at a cannery from ten o’clock at night till six o’clock in the morning then going to class at nine in the morning getting two and a half hours of sleep when you get to home from school going back to the cannery that’s putting in work that’s putting in work and finally never give up persistence persistence persistence persistence persistence 12 rejection letters i guess it was 11 rejection letters got it on the 12th 11 rejection letters 11 years of rejection and what am i doing what can i do how can i get better where can i improve and on top of all that listen it’s the journey it’s the process it’s the track it’s the voyage that are the most important part and if if you go on that path even if you don’t make it to the end of the path if you go on that path look at how much further you are along in life look about how much better you have improved as a human being so relish the struggle and even relish when you come up short which you will that’s part of it keep reaching keep scratching and no matter what keep getting after it and until next time this is carrie and jocko out
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