FILM · 2023 · MEXICO
A Million Miles Away
17 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
17 Interesting Facts About A Million Miles Away
Interesting Facts (14)
- #001
The STS-128 launch pad technician "USA 1" who helps Michael Peña (as Jose Hernandez) into Discovery turns out to be a smiling Jose Hernandez himself.
- #002
According to former NASA pilot, aviation expert and science fiction writer Charlie Justiz, locally made Texas tortillas have been on NASA's shuttle and ISS menus since the 1980s. Tortillas beat bread because they don't shed crumbs that could clog air filters, and since the early 2000s NASA's tortillas have been specially made to keep for up to 18 months while staying safe and tasty.
- #003
Before Jose Hernandez was accepted as an astronaut candidate, when he got an engineering job at NASA, Adela Hernandez realized her dream of owning and running a restaurant: Tierra Luna Mexican Grill, a family business on Saturn Lane in Houston, a short way from JSC where Jose worked. Jose really did wait tables and wash dishes after hours. Tierra Luna closed in 2011 when Jose retired from NASA and the family moved to Lodi, California, but the name lives on in Jose's engineering firm and the family's vineyard and wine.
- #004
In 2009, while in orbit on his Space Shuttle mission, Jose Hernandez became the first person to tweet from space in Spanish.
- #005
It's based on the true story of José Moreno Hernández (Jose Hernandez), the first migrant farmworker to become a NASA astronaut.
- #006
According to an interview with the directors on TheCinemaholic, Jose didn't really meet Adela at a car dealership. His sister Leticia spent more than a year setting up a blind date: she shopped regularly at the Macy's where Adela worked and knew the two would hit it off. She was right; they did, and two years of dating ended in marriage. The rest, as they say, is history. The car dealership scene is a small "meet cute" liberty with the facts, since some things have to be squeezed to fit a 30-year story.
- #007
Using "Contrabando y Traición" was Michael Peña's idea; he remembered the Los Tigres del Norte song as his father's favorite.
- #008
The real Jose Hernandez ran for Congress as a Democrat in California's 10th District in 2012 but lost.
- #009
The fields on screen were shot in San Luis Potosí, on the farm where director Alejandra Márquez Abella spent a lot of her childhood.
- #010
One of the films that inspired the look of the sets and costumes was Allison Anders's My Crazy Life (1993), which was also Salma Hayek's first film.
- #011
Ingredient #1: Find your goal. Ingredient #2: Know how far away you are. Ingredient #3: Draw a roadmap. Ingredient #4: If you don't know how, learn. Ingredient #5: When you think you've made it, you probably need to work harder.
- #012
Growing up in a migrant farmworker family, Jose Hernandez went to many schools and didn't learn English until he was 12. From 1990 to 2001 he worked at Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, where he helped develop full-field digital mammography equipment for early breast cancer detection. Turned down by NASA 11 times over three years, he was selected for astronaut training in May 2004 and flew on Space Shuttle mission STS-128 from August 28 to September 11, 2009. He also headed the Materials and Processes branch at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. His mission made 217 orbits of Earth, covering more than 5.7 million miles in 332 hours 53 minutes, and he left NASA in 2011.
- #013
Epilogue: "José's shuttle mission STS stayed at the International Space Station for 13 days, where he ate tacos and listened to José Alfredo Jiménez's 'El Hijo del Pueblo.' José is the first migrant farmworker to travel to space." "He still picks grapes with his father, but now they own the vineyard and make and sell their own wine, Tierra Luna Cellars. Adela and José are building a house where they plan to retire one day." The epilogue includes footage of Jose Hernandez's spaceflight and NASA mission.
- #014
A small goof: when the shuttle reaches orbit, the character turns to the window behind him to look at Earth, but that window looks into the cargo bay and should have been closed.
Production Story (1)
- #015
In the film, Jose Hernandez works on anti-ICBM missile defense (once nicknamed "Star Wars") at LLL and finds and fixes a problem that saves the project's funding. He was also co-inventor of the digital mammogram at LLL, which he told the SF Chronicle on September 15, 2023, he counts among his proudest achievements because of the many lives it has saved. It's not in the film, but it deserves celebrating.
Behind the Scenes (1)
- #016
To make José shake during the launch, cinematographer Dariela Ludlow Deloya used a gadget familiar from Mexican TV shopping ads: a vibrating body shaker.
Career & Awards (1)
- #017
It's a common misconception that Jose Hernandez was NASA's first Latino astronaut. He wasn't; he's the first Latino migrant farmworker to become one, and class and ethnicity are the key distinctions here. NASA's first Latino astronaut was Franklin Chang-Diaz, who flew his first mission in 1986 and went on to fly six more over a 25-year NASA career that ended with his induction into the agency's Hall of Fame. In honoring Jose Hernandez, no one should forget Franklin Chang Díaz. Check NASA's facts…
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- IMDb
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