When NASA astronauts go to house, they’re allowed to convey a small variety of private possessions with them. Typically these embody household photographs, baseball hats, and even musical devices. However when Col. Nick Hague turns into the primary Guardian to launch into house later this 12 months, he will probably be taking a particular set of sheet music together with him.
“When it comes to tradition, one of many issues the House Drive spent a whole lot of time on was the House Drive tune,” Hague informed reporters at a media roundtable March 28. “So I’m taking on a pair authentic sheets of music from the House Drive tune and I’ll get them again to the band members and composers that helped craft that.”
Every U.S. army department has a tune, and the House Drive unveiled its personal at AFA’s Air, House, and Cyber Convention in 2022. Named after the House Drive motto “Semper Supra,” (Latin for ‘All the time Above’) the tune took years of labor.
“I knew they wished one thing that was singable and that match with the opposite anthems—the opposite service songs—and that might be one thing that would final,” Jamie Teachenor, who composed the tune, informed Air & House Forces Journal. A former member of the U.S. Air Drive Academy’s nation band, Teachenor labored on the tune with then-Chief of House Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond and Coast Guard Chief Musician Sean Nelson to rearrange it for efficiency.
Apart from sheet music, Hague can also be taking on House Drive flags, patches, and different mementos from House Drive items that make house exploration potential. He plans on bringing the keepsakes again to these items when he returns.
“These satellites that they’re working, these are the capabilities that underpin us having the ability to even get to orbit,” he mentioned. “They assist monitor all of the stuff that we might run into, they assist information us by means of house with GPS, house area consciousness, and understanding the place we’re at and the place we’re going.”
Apart from mentioning mementos, Hague plans on reaching out to Guardians privately from house to “allow them to know what sort of influence they’re having on us.” He will probably be in orbit when the department celebrates its fifth birthday on Dec. 20.
Hague is just not the primary Guardian in house; Col. Michael Hopkins took that honor when he transferred into the House Drive in 2020 whereas aboard the Worldwide House Station. For essentially the most half, Guardians management satellites from the bottom, however Hague would be the first to launch into house when he and three crewmates trip a House X Dragon out of Kennedy House Middle, Fla., as much as the ISS. The mission is predicted to launch in August.
The mission will final six months, a lot of which will probably be crammed up with scientific experiments. Although the precise type of experiments are nonetheless being decided, astronauts are skilled on sure units of abilities, and scientists construct experiments to work inside that skillset, Hague defined. On his previous journey to house, a few of these concerned 3D-printing human tissue and genome enhancing.
“It’s nearly like Christmas day by day up there, since you’re opening a cargo bag and pulling out a brand new experiment that you just’ve by no means seen earlier than,” he mentioned. “However we practice to have the essential abilities to have the ability to do these, so we’re prepared after they [the scientists] want it.”
Hopefully this journey will probably be much less dramatic than his first mission. In 2018, Hague and his crewmate, cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, had simply launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan when their Soyuz spacecraft suffered a catastrophic rocket booster malfunction, forcing an abort.
“The rocket basically disintegrated below us,” Hague informed reporters.
However simply 5 months later, Hague was again in a Soyuz, which this time efficiently took him as much as the ISS for a 203-day keep. The distinction between the Nineteen Sixties-era Soyuz and the fashionable Dragon spacecraft is “evening and day,” he mentioned, because the Dragon options extra automation designed to cut back the burden on the operator, in addition to “a way more comfy seat.” However the colonel expects the butterflies in his abdomen to be the identical as that first launch.
“House is a dangerous enterprise,” he mentioned. “We practice for every thing that we will envision going incorrect and what to do in these situations.”
The coaching results in a type of double-awareness the place crews benefit from the launch and the house mission however are additionally vigilant always for “the subsequent factor that would go incorrect,” he mentioned. Which may be much more true if Hague goes on an area stroll, maybe to put in {hardware} for mounting new photo voltaic arrays on the ISS.
“It’s all these issues I dreamed of after I was 5 years previous. I’m simply on the market holding on to an area station zipping by means of house at 5 miles a second, watching the Earth coast by,” mentioned Hague, a veteran of three prior house walks. “It’s fairly phenomenal.”
As NASA prepares to ship astronauts again to the Moon and, finally, to Mars, the company is hiring new astronauts to make the journey. Hague pushed his fellow Guardians to use for each the astronaut program and for NASA positions normally. April 16 is that this 12 months’s software deadline for hopeful astronauts.
“I feel Guardians want to acknowledge that they work in advanced management rooms, managing dynamic groups, making an attempt to deal with technical issues as they method,” he mentioned. “Should you have a look at that ability set, and also you have a look at what we do in Mission Management, at Johnson House Middle, they’re analogous. So any person who has that, is a extremely nice teammate, handles strain nicely, and might adapt to issues as they modify. These are excellent candidates.
“9 instances out of 10, what I discover is that individuals assume, ‘the necessities are so excessive, no person’s ever going to pick me,’” he added. “Make us say no. Put in an software.”