Astronaut with Central Minnesota Ties Prepares to Blast Off to International Space Station

(KNSI) – At 2:42 a.m. Central Time on Friday morning, St. John’s University alumnus Mark Vande Hei will lift off on his second journey to the International Space Station.

Vande Hei received his bachelor’s degree in physics at St. John’s and later became a colonel in the U.S. Army. In 2009, NASA selected him to become an astronaut. His first space flight happened in late 2017, and during that time, Vande Hei spent 168 days in space and conducted four spacewalks.

This time around, he is the flight engineer for Expedition 64/65 to the ISS. Vande Hei said before training for this mission, he was actually training as a back-up for another ISS launch, which proceeded as planned in October 2020. For the past few months, he’s been training on the other side of the world.

“Because of COVID concerns and transportation requirements, I actually got sent to Russia to train on the Russian systems a little earlier than I normally would have,” Vande Hei said.

Vande Hei is now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, but he said in March that throughout his training with his two Russian colleagues, COVID mitigation measures have been key.

“We’re all wearing masks all the time, even in the Soyuz simulator when we’re shoulder-to-shoulder, and I’m in a spacesuit — because the air actually gets exchanged between those spacesuits in some instances — I wear a mask,” Vande Hei said. “It’s not very comfortable, but it’s the right thing to do.”

When he gets to the ISS, Vande Hei says he will help facilitate experiments in space.

“The way I like to describe my job on the space station is like I’m a laboratory technician,” Vande Hei said. “So I’m not like a scientist — if I was a scientist, I would be making up experiments, I’d be gathering data, doing data analysis, writing papers. What I’m doing is … facilitate the success of [scientists’] work and to install their experience.”

During his first stay on the ISS, Vande Hei said it took a few weeks to acclimate to zero gravity and having to move around the station in a different way. He says it’s that feeling of absolute freedom of motion he’s missed the most while on Earth.

“It can be really, really fun once you get past the initial discomfort, the weirdness of the whole thing,” Vande Hei said.

Vande Hei and his crewmates lift off from the Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:42 p.m. local time, or for Minnesotans, 2:42 a.m. Friday morning.

___