Jose Hernandez had to widen his gaze, a lot, to understand what some people can’t with their feet firmly planted on the ground and head in the clouds. Jose Hernandez was an astronaut with the National Aeronautical Space Administration (NASA) who traveled to space to fulfill his childhood dream.
After applying to the prestigious institute 11 times, Mr. Hernandez was finally roped into the 19th class of astronauts in 2004. He is the son of a Mexician immigrant couple and showed interest in aeronautical engineering quite early on. After listening to astronauts making way into space over the radio, Jose set his targets high, as high as the world beyond itself. He showed that determination and dedication never go unrewarded. So when Jose finally got his chance to go into space, one thing struck him like a lightening in that vacuum packed space. “We were flying over North America and you can tell Canada, the United States and Mexico [are] there, but what struck me as something of beauty was that you couldn’t tell where Canada ended and the U.S. began, or where the U.S. ended and Mexico began,” he said. “I had to leave this world to come to the conclusion that borders are a human-made concept.”
Quite ironic to think that we have to leave our home completely to understand that our home is all over, it is not just Canada or U.S.A. or Mexico – it is Earth as a whole. We are humans as a whole and not black or white or brown. And like even the famous Indian astronaut, Rakesh Sharma, said, “My mental boundaries expanded when I viewed the Earth against a black and uninviting vacuum, yet my country’s rich traditions had conditioned me to look beyond man-made boundaries and prejudices. One does not have to undertake a space flight to come by this feeling.”
True. A space flight is not needed to feel that out of the world experience. But probably for gaining that wider perspective some people who are trying to build walls around borders may do well if they were taken to space– and probably left there.
