HotmailAstronaut taking Twitter to space en Español
Astro_Jose updates his followers bilingually during flight preparations
 | Astronaut Jose Hernandez gets help with the donning of a training version of his shuttle launch and entry suit in preparation for a training session at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. Hernandez is due to fly on the shuttle Discovery in August. |
James Blair / NASA |
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WASHINGTON - NASA has tweeted in space, but now one of its astronauts will tweet what no one has tweeted in orbit before: He’ll be sending his Twitter updates in Spanish as well as English.
Astronaut Jose Hernandez grew up in a migrant farming family and didn’t learn English until he was 12. He is scheduled to fly aboard the space shuttle Discovery in August and tweet bilingually from orbit. It will be his first flight.
His Twitter account is Astro_Jose. He has already started tweeting in both languages while training on the ground.
The first tweet, or Twitter update, came on Monday: "El primer dia de nuestra semana de ensayo simulando nuestra primer semana en el espacio! First day of simulating our first week in space!"
Since then, Hernandez has alternated between Spanish and English. NASA says this is the agency’s first Twitter account in Spanish.
Twitter is an increasingly popular service that lets users pass along 140-character messages to their "followers" from computres or mobile phones.
NASA astronaut Mike Massimino became the first astronaut to send tweets from orbit during May's mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, and the commander for this month's schedule flight to the international space station, Mark Polansky, has been tweeting for weeks.
This report includes information from The Associated Press and msnbc.com.
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