Kansas astronaut Nick Hague returns to state to talk about his time in space – The Hutchinson News

A young Nick Hague once looked up toward the sky from his hometown in Hoxie, Kansas, and dreamt of visiting the stars and seeing what he could discover.

"Who doesn't grow up in western Kansas and stare up at the night sky?" Hague said. "You can see so much, and you look up, and you're like, hey, I want to figure out what's out there go discover what's unknown."

Hague, who was born in Belleville, but considers Hoxie his home town,visited the Dillon Lecture Series on Tuesday, April 5, at the Hutchinson Sports Arena as the series' 162 speaker.

After the lecture, Hague visited with second-grade students from Plum Creek Elementary School and fifth-grade students from McCandless Elementary School at the Cosmosphere. There, he reviewed a NASA experiment where Hague was directly involved.

Hague said as a child he wanted to become an astronaut, as many other children dream of, but at one point, he began to look at it as a goal.

"There's a difference between a childhood dream and professional ambition," he said.

After finding interest in complicated machinery and STEM education, especially in aeronautics and astronautical engineering, he began to look at becoming an astronaut.

"Then it became a professional ambition because that's what the space business is all about," Hague said.

The road toward becoming an astronaut, Hague said, wasn't easy. He hit multiple bumps, including his first-ever launch ending in aborting the spacecraft and landing safely on the ground.

"Sometimes, it doesn't go the way you expected. Right after the first stage of the launch, we were supposed to throw away the empty fuel tanks," Hague said. "After we tried to throw them, one of those empty tanks hit the rocket and caused it to disintegrate."

Hague and his crewmate, Aleksey Ovchinin from Russia, were traveling at 4,000 miles per hour when the craft began to fall apart. By following procedures, they ejected from the spacecraft.

When he flew back to the United States, Hague recalled when his wife, Caitie Hague, greeted, huggedand reassured him after the successful landing.

"She put her hand on my chest and says, 'don't worry, you'll get another chance,'" Hague said. "Fast forward five months later, it's a nighttime launch this time... It goes off flawless. Six hours later, I docked to the International Space Station, went through the hatch and embraced the crew."

Hague then spent 203 days at the space station as a flight engineer. In the first few days, he said his body had to adjust to the weightlessness of orbit.

In the following seven months, he maintained the ship, completed three spacewalks and conducted experiments with his other crewmates.

What surprised Hague was the diversity of the crew on the space station and all the countries that provided training up until launch.

"Of all the things that I probably shouldn't have been surprised about was how international flying on the International Space Station really is," Hague said. "I spent long periods of time in Houston training, but also Huntsville in Montreal, Canada, in Tokyo, Japan, Cologne, Germany and Star City, Russia."

On the space station, Hague said he and the crewmates would often sit around the ship's dinner table, swapping stories of their families or celebrating a birthday while one of the crewmates played their favorite music.

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While on the space station during expeditions 59 and 60, one of the experiments Hague helped with was growing plants while in zero gravity.

These experiments would help NASA on its mission to find new strategies for longevity during space travel, especially for long flights like a mission to Mars.

In one of their experiments, NASA decided to include two elementary classes from Hutchinson, McCandless Elementary School's sixth-grade students and Plum Creek Elementary School'ssecond-grade students.

The students received two groups of tomato seeds, one that developed on the space station as group P and another that originated on Earth, group N.

The students and their teachers didn't know which group had developed in zero-gravity conditions but treated both groups the same and made predictions about the plants.

"A week after spring break, we all started growing our plants at the same time. Both groups got the same exact sunlight, same exact water, they were both in the same condition," said Hope Yohn, 12, a sixth-grade student at McCandless.

After observing the plants in each group, Hopesaid she and her classmates predicted group P was the group that developed in space. On Tuesday, Hague visited the classes at the Cosmosphere and confirmed Hope'shypothesis.

Hope's classmate, Milo Howard, 12, suspected that the radiation from the sun caused the plants to be less successful during germination.

One of McCandless's sixth-grade teachers, Elizabeth Vieyra, said helping with this experiment was exciting for her class and her students.

"Hope loves space, and Milo wants to be an astronaut, and so the fact that I can offer them that real-life experience that they can hopefully someday use on a resume is amazing to me as their teacher," Vieyra said.

After watching Hague walk through the doors into one of the Cosmosphere's conference rooms, Hope said she felt light-headed from excitement.

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Once Hague finished recounting his story about his expeditions to the space station, he decided to walk into the audience and answer questions from school children and attendees.

Hague said he often speaks with school children and visits their classrooms, even once from the space station through a video call to the sixth-grade class at McCandless and the second-grade class at Plum Creek.

Something he thought essential to share with the younger audience was to "dream big, and be passionate about that dream," Hague said.

He also wanted to appeal to the older audience members, sharing something he learned through his time on the space station.

"The exploration of space has proved over time to be this endeavor that has this immense power to draw people together, to bridge divides in perspective and culture," Hague said.

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Kansas astronaut Nick Hague returns to state to talk about his time in space - The Hutchinson News