My immigrant uncle helped in moon landing
Heroes in this country come from all over
AUSTIN — I didn’t know my tío, Miguel Hernandez, very well growing up. He lived in Houston, which, for a Cuban-American kid like me in Miami, was as faraway and foreign as Anchorage or Reykjavik. To our family, though, Miguel was a living legend, someone who worked for NASA, lunched with astronauts and met presidents. It wasn’t until much later, however, that I discovered the depth of his role in helping U.S. astronauts reach the moon — and the unlikely path from Havana to Houston that got him there.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing Saturday, there will be films, forums and praise for household names such as Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. But a legion of engineers, mathematicians and the occasional Cuban immigrant also helped realize that Herculean feat. “I never imagined I’d be involved in this type of work,” Miguel told me recently. “But I was always interested in it.”
Growing up in Cuba, he’d rifle through “Aviation Week & Space Technology.” In 1959, shortly after Fidel Castro took hold of the island and began steering it into Soviet-style communism, a replica of the Soviet Sputnik I — the first satellite to orbit the Earth — arrived on a ship in Havana Harbor. Miguel, then 17, marveled at the polished metal orb with four antennae.
Fleeing Cuba
As Castro nationalized companies and seized homes, 19-year-old Miguel turned against the government, handing out anti-Castro pamphlets. When his activist friends began landing in prison, he fled Cuba, heading first to Miami and later to New York City to live with relatives. He had $100 in his pocket and knew no English.
He worked in the mailroom of American International Underwriters (now AIG) downtown and took English classes at night. But his mind often drifted skyward. He read of how Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in April 1961, followed a few weeks later by American Alan Shepard. He attended the ticker-tape parade for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. He marveled when, soon after, President John Kennedy promised that America would be the first to put a man on the moon: “I said, ‘These people are crazy.’ ”
When he had learned enough English, Miguel attended the University of Florida, graduating with a mechanical engineering degree. When NASA recruiters visited his campus in 1966, he jumped at the chance. He was assigned to the newly opened Kennedy Space Center, training astronauts for the nascent Apollo missions. Miguel and a team of other engineers were tasked with learning all the systems required to propel a man into space and teach them to the astronauts via simulators. His specialty: propulsion and rockets.
By 1969, buzz was mounting for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Miguel and his team worked 24-hour shifts, doublechecking systems and readying the astronauts to reach the moon. “You needed to have the confidence of the astronauts,” he said. “You couldn’t at any moment tell them something that later turned out to be wrong. That could cost them their lives.”
Miguel watched the moon landing like millions of others: on a TV set in his living room with his family. “It was an accomplishment for the whole world,” he said. “It was something not just that the United States did — it was something the human race did.”
Presidential Medal of Freedom
That year, Miguel broadcast the Apollo 12 mission in Spanish for La Fabulosa WFAB radio station in Miami. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the rescue of the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, which was nearly stranded in space after an oxygen tank exploded.
Perhaps his greatest achievement was a sizable puncture in the agency’s color barrier. At a time when the civil rights movement was reaching its apex, Miguel was the only Latino in his department and the only one he knew of at NASA. He said he never felt discriminated against; everyone was too focused on the missions to care about race or nationalities.
Miguel left NASA in the 1980s and parlayed his experience into a business that contracted with the space agency. As luck has it, I now live in Austin, a two-hour drive from Houston. I’ve taken my wife and two daughters to visit Miguel, now 77 and retired. Elle, 8, recently acquired a fascination with outer space and astronauts and hopes to be the first human on Mars. Miguel has promised her special access to NASA training facilities and introductions to astronauts next time we’re in town.
One day, spinning gently in zero gravity on the International Space Station, she’ll peer out a window and look down at Earth and think of those who blazed her trail to the stars.