Space Wasn't Final Frontier For Astronaut-turned-candidate

Space wasn't final frontier for astronaut-turned-candidate Houston Chronicle Copyright 2012 Houston Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Published 09:26 p.m., Saturday, March 3, 2012 [...] reality set in at the end of many of those exhausting, dust-choked days, when his father, Salvador, covered in sweat and dirt, would turn to his four children in the backseat of the car and offer a warning. Soon after that illegal crossing, his father got a permanent resident card and eventually citizenship, as did his mother, Julia. Later, he earned his electrical engineering degree at the University of the Pacific in Stockton and his master's degree at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 14 years. [...] NASA accepted him into the astronaut program, and he spent two weeks aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 2009. Because he's lived in Houston for the last decade, working for NASA, he will surely be branded as a carpet bagger. Should Hernandez do well in the June 5 primary, his likely November opponent would be first-term Republican incumbent Rep.