TYLER, Texas — Editor's Note: The above video was published on Sept. 18, 2023.
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, the Tyler Hispanic Business Alliance and Tyler Junior College will host a free “Movie on the Lawn” event Tuesday showing the new film about the first Mexican-American astronaut Dr. José Hernández.
The community-wide showing of Amazon Studio's "A Million Miles Away" will start at 7 p.m. Tuesday, and there will be popcorn and drinks, according to the event description.
"A Million Miles Away" tells the story of Hernández coming from working on the farm with his family to eventually becoming a NASA flight engineer.
According to the José M. Hernández Reaching for the Stars Foundation, he is one of four children born into a migrant farming family from Mexico. He spent much of his childhood traveling from Mexico to southern California annually and then to the central part of the state as part of the family's farm.
After graduating high school, he attended University of the Pacific in Stockton and earned degree in electrical engineering. With a full scholarship to the graduate program at the University of California in Santa Barbara, he continued his engineering studies, the foundation website stated.
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he co-developed the first full-field digital mammography imaging system, which has become useful to detect breast cancer at an earlier stage than present film/screen mammography techniques, the website explained.
Hernández joined the Johnson Space Center in 2001 and later became chief of the materials and processes branch. He was chosen to be in the 19th class of astronauts in 2004, and two years later, he completed the astronaut candidate training. In 2009, he served as a mission specialist on the STS-128 mission on board the Space Shuttle, Discovery, the foundation website said.