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Jose Hernandez

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On a historic evening in 1972, ten-year-old José Hernandez kneeled in front of an old black-and-white television. He gripped the rabbit ears of the antenna, using his body to boost the signal. As the fuzzy image on the screen became clearer, José watched the last Apollo astronauts bound across the surface of the moon.

José was mesmerized by the moonwalk, but he yearned for an even better view. He unglued his eyes from the screen, raced outside to look at the moon, and ran back in time to see one of the astronauts take his final giant leap. José hoped that one day, he could etch his own footsteps alongside theirs in the lunar dirt.

Many kids go through an astronaut phase, but José was committed to making his dream a reality. Since his strongest subjects were math and science, he decided engineering would be his ride to space. Over the next two decades, he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering and landed a job as an engineer at a federal research facility. He wanted to make his application as strong as possible for NASA.

In 1989, José was ready to throw his hat in the ring. He carefully filled out the 47 sections of the astronaut application, enclosed his resume and transcripts, and shipped his packet off to Houston. Soon he was checking his mailbox daily, eagerly awaiting an envelope from NASA. After ten long months, it finally arrived. He ripped it open and read the letter from the head of the astronaut selection office. Not selected.

José wasn’t fazed. His aspirations were high, but his expectations were modest—he knew the odds were long. He took the initiative to call NASA for feedback, and followed up with a letter asking how he could improve:

NASA got back to him with disappointing news. Since he hadn’t made it past the initial screening, they didn’t have notes or advice for him to absorb. Undeterred, he applied again . . . and was rejected again.

José didn’t give up hope. He kept putting himself back in the ring—revising his resume, highlighting his strengths, updating his references as he reapplied—only to be met with rejection after rejection. He couldn’t even get his foot in the door for an interview.

In 1996, the last rejection broke his spirit. José had the sinking feeling that he would never be enough for NASA. He crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it at the garbage can. He was so disappointed that when it missed, he just left it on the floor.

In life, there are few things more consequential than the judgments people make of our potential. When colleges evaluate students for admission and employers interview applicants for jobs, they’re making forecasts about future success. These predictions can become gateways to opportunity. Whether the door swings open or slams shut hangs in the balance of their assessments.

What José didn’t know was that none of his applications even registered a blip on NASA’s radar. They were looking for people with operational experience making decisions in high-stress environments. They expected to see noteworthy accomplishments by engineers. They took notice of applicants who graduated at the top of their class. NASA was focused on finding people who had already achieved great things, and by their standards, that wasn’t José. But what NASA’s process failed to capture—as so many organizations do—was a candidate’s potential for doing greater things.

In the time between application cycles, José had developed and demonstrated the unusual combination of technical, physical, and character skills that NASA supposedly prized. With a mentor at work, he won a government grant and developed a digital cancer detection technology that helped save many lives. In his spare time, he ran seven marathons with a personal best under three hours—26.2 miles at a pace under seven minutes per mile. Along with being disciplined and determined, he was prosocial: he volunteered to tutor high school students in math, started a chapter of a professional society for Mexican American scientists and engineers, and served his community in a series of local and national leadership roles. Each time he reapplied to be an astronaut, he highlighted new accomplishments, but they didn’t make a dent.

NASA missed the markers of José’s potential because their selection process wasn’t designed to detect them. They had information about work experience and past performance, not life experience and background. They didn’t know that José was raised in a family of migrant farmworkers. They didn’t know that when he started kindergarten in California, he didn’t speak English, and it wasn’t until he turned twelve that he finally felt fluent. They didn’t know that he had traveled a great distance just to make it to college and become an engineer. The lack of accomplishments in his early applications seemed to reveal the absence of ability, but it actually indicated the presence of adversity.

It’s a mistake to judge people solely by the heights they’ve reached. By favoring applicants who have already excelled, selection systems underestimate and overlook candidates who are capable of greater things. When we confuse past performance with future potential, we miss out on people whose achievements have involved overcoming major obstacles. We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they’ve climbed, and how they’ve grown along the way. The test of a diamond in the rough is not whether it shines from the start, but how it responds to heat or pressure.

Since NASA invited candidates to update their applications every year, José got an annual do-over. By 1996, after a string of rejections, he was on the verge of quitting when his wife, Adela, encouraged him not to throw away his dream. “Let NASA be the one to disqualify you,” she urged. “Don’t disqualify yourself.”

José realized there was more he could do to qualify himself: he would “become a sponge.” He learned that most astronauts were pilots and scuba divers, so he took a year to earn his pilot’s license and spent another year driving to scuba diving training every weekend until he got his basic, advanced, and master certifications. And when his federal lab presented him with an unconventional opportunity to work on curtailing nuclear proliferation in Siberia, José took it on one condition: he would get to learn to speak Russian as part of the deal. He hoped it would help him stand out in NASA’s next cycle.

In 1998, when José was 36, he sent off another astronaut application. And at long last, there was encouraging news. Of over 2,500 applicants, he was one of 120 finalists.

José finally had the opportunity to provide a complete, live work sample. He went through a full week of physical and psychological assessment at Johnson Space Center. Former astronauts queried him on engineering and flying technicalities and teamwork and communication skills. He took tests that required him to rotate objects in his mind and solve problems under pressure. Out of a possible 99 points, the astronaut selection board gave José a score of 91.

The interviewers didn’t ask him about hardship directly. They gave him an hour to talk about his background. For the first time, feeling confident that he had proven his technical skills, José opened up and told NASA he’d started out as a migrant farmer. “If you could accomplish all that by coming from someplace like José did,” Duane Ross says, “to overcome all that and get to the same place other people got, then you have a lot of desire and capability.”

After the interview, José got a personal call from Duane. Unfortunately, they were rejecting him again. But this time, there was a silver lining. They were offering him a job . . . not as an astronaut, but as an engineer.

José had been adapting every year. Now he would have to adapt again. Although he might not be going up himself, he could be part of the mission to send humans to space. The experience taught him a lesson: “There is more than one star in the sky and more than one goal and purpose in life.”

After a number of years working as a NASA engineer, in 2004, José heard his phone ring. The voice on the other end of the line asked if he was replaceable. José said he was happy to train someone to take his place. “Good,” the manager said. “How would you like to come work for the astronaut office?”

After 15 years of applying, José was selected to go to space. “The second I heard the good news,” he recalls, “my whole body went numb.” He raced home to break the news to his wife, children, and parents, who celebrated by hugging and dancing.