For most of us the idea of going into outer space is merely fantasy. But not for one southern Missourian, who recently described his space experience to a crowd at the Springfield Library Center. KSMU’s Theresa Bettmann was there.
“Welcome everybody. It’s great to be there in spirit. I actually grew up in the local area there not too far up the road at Lake of the Ozarks. I went to school at School of the Osage right near the Bagnell Dam. I’m a local guy who grew up on a farm.”
That’s NASA astronaut Colonel Michael Hopkins, who spoke to a mesmerized audience from Houston on Friday via Skype. The event was part of World of Space Week.
Born in Lebanon, Hopkins said his dream of becoming an astronaut started in high school. He studied aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois and Stanford University, and later served as a flight test engineer in the Air Force. Hopkins says it took him 13 years and four tries before he was finally selected in 2009 into the 20th NASA astronaut class.
Hopkins began his space expedition with two Russian astronauts on September 25, 2013 and lived on the International Space Station for six months before returning home in March. During his one-hour Skype session Hopkins shared photos and videos taken from space plus discussed his day-to-day experiences.
“I have to tell you from just a ‘this is really cool to be here’ standpoint, the floating is something that never got old. It’s really hard here in 1 g down here on Earth to imagine what it’s like to be able to float around. Just picture in that room that you are sitting in right now, that if you just pushed off with your hands you could float right up to the ceiling and flip upside down, and it wouldn’t matter,” shares Hopkins.
During Hopkins’ 166 days in space the crew completed 2, 656 orbits of Earth and traveled more than 70 million miles.
His talk Friday kicked off the first day of World of Space week activities taking place at the Library Center.
Tammy Flippen is the reference librarian.
“World of Space week was sanctioned in 1999 by the United Nations. And it’s a world event, there are events taking place in over 80 countries. Millions of people take part in all of the activities,” says Flippen.
This is the first year that the Library Center has participated in the event.
“It’s great because all of these are family events and we encourage families to take part in the geocache adventure and also the Citizen Science program. Being able to find out all kinds of cool things like [for example] you can help NASA classify photos from Mars,” Flippen says.
World of Space week activities continue through October 10th.
