Father Dave welcomes José Hernández, former NASA flight engineer and the first migrant farm worker to travel to space. “A Million Miles Away,” a new Amazon Prime movie based on his life, follows José and his devoted family on a decades-long journey, from a rural village in Mexico, to the fields of California, to more than 200 miles above the Earth in the International Space Station.
José first dreamt of going to space after watching NASA’s Apollo 17 mission as a child in 1972. He describes his father’s support and says, “Even though [my father] only has a third grade elementary school education and is a migrant farm worker, he had the wisdom to sit me down and give me a simple five-ingredient recipe [for success].” His father’s five steps were to determine your purpose in life, recognize how far you are from your goal, draw a road map to achieve your goal, prepare yourself, and develop a strong work ethic. “I added a sixth one, which is perseverance; never give up,” José says.
José persevered after NASA rejected his astronaut application 11 times before accepting him. He finally realized his dream of traveling to space on a mission in 2009, 37 years after first imagining it. Considering José’s resolve, Father Dave recounts a scene in the movie that questions if going to space was worth it. “Oh yeah, it was worth it,” José underscores. “You’re out there and going around the world once every 90 minutes. Those 14 days I was up there, I went around the world 217 times. You have one window to the beauty of our Earth, and you have the opposite window to our universe; You see how perfect and how magical it is.”
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A devout Catholic, José traveled to space with a St. Christopher medal, a rosary, and a scapular. “People ask me, ‘How can science and religion coexist?’…it’s very easy, because science tells you how things happen, the rules of engagement; Religion tells you why they happen. This is why they could coexist together, and this is why I could coexist as a Catholic scientist.”
Father Dave notes how this film about José’s life serves as a form of evangelization. “I would imagine that a lot of kids see astronauts and say, ‘That’d be cool, I’d like to do that.’ But it’s more than just going through school and getting a degree. It really does take so much of the cardinal virtue of perseverance, of believing in something beyond yourself, and also very much believing in yourself.”
José responds, “You also get help along the way. There’s that teacher that came to my house when I was in the second grade, and pleaded with my parents that we needed to stay in one place and stop living that nomadic, migrant, farm-working lifestyle; [so] we made Northern California our home. It’s my wife – when I got rejected [from NASA] for the sixth time, and I’m ready to throw in the towel, she props me up and says that she believes in me. But then she asks that simple yet profound question: What do the folks that got selected have that you don’t?”
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As they discuss José’s opportunity to see the Earth from space, Father Dave also calls to mind Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si. Father Dave says, “[Pope Francis] keeps reminding us that we must care for our common home, but not just in the way we might think about saving electricity or fossil fuels. It’s really an integral ecology that talks about people…trying to give a lot of us this bird’s eye view that you literally had, looking down at our common home that we must care for.”
“I’ve had the privilege to see the world from the outside,” José says. “Here we are flying over North America, and you see Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. What struck me as so beautiful was that you couldn’t tell where one country ended and the other began. I said, My God, I had to go out of this world to realize that, down there, we are just one. Borders are human-made concepts designed to separate us, and how sad, because we’re just one down there.”