Today in History, 1993: North Dakota-born astronaut leaves Fargo school kids starstruck

On this day in 1993, Jamestown native and astronaut Rick Hieb visited Fargo’s Roosevelt Elementary School, captivating students with stories of his record-breaking spacewalks and the daily realities of life in orbit.

Here is the complete story as it appeared in the paper that day:

By Tom Pantera, STAFF WRITER

Like some astronauts, Rick Hieb downplays the importance of the profession. “We have an astronaut office; there’s a hundred of us in there,” he said. “My office-mates are astronauts. My neighbor one street over is the commander of my last flight. The next street over is the commander of the previous flight. We’re kind of a dime a dozen around where we all live” in Houston, he said.

“We sort of realize that if we make a mistake, it’s going to be of historic proportions,” he said. “But you don’t really think of yourself as being some kind of historic figure.”

But the 37-year-old Jamestown, N.D., native said his importance as a role model comes home when he speaks to children, as he did Thursday at Fargo’s Roosevelt Elementary School.

He kept the kids spellbound with a description of the May 1992 space shuttle mission in which he was one of three astronauts who walked in space to recover an errant satellite — the largest and longest space walk in history. He illustrated his talk with slides and film of the mission, including the capture of the satellite.

But he drew perhaps his biggest reactions when he explained how astronauts handle going to the bathroom during long spacewalks — adult-size diapers — and the peculiar cleanup problems that come with getting nauseous in a weightless environment.

Hieb already has started training for his next mission, when he will be payload commander aboard the shuttle Columbia in July 1994, although he noted the schedule “might slip a little bit.”

It will be an international spacelab mission, meaning a pressurized laboratory containing 80 different experiments will be housed in the shuttle’s payload bay.

“Every one of those scientists wants to teach us their science we’ll be doing on that flight,” he said.

About 40 percent of the experiments will be done for Japanese scientists, about 50 percent will be for Europeans, 5 percent for Canadians and the rest for Americans. The flight will last 13 days, and the shuttle will carry enough astronauts for two work shifts.

Hieb and others in the crew spent much of December in Europe for training and will be going to Europe and Japan for more training until about June.

He said he could have put in for a flight that featured another spacewalk, but he wanted to be a payload commander of a spacelab instead.

A 1973 graduate of Jamestown High School, Hieb earned degrees in math and physics from Northwest Nazarene College in Nampa, Idaho, in 1977 and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado in 1979. He joined NASA right out of graduate school, becoming an astronaut in 1986.

His first mission was in spring 1991 as a crew member of the shuttle Discovery.

Hieb would not say Thursday if the 1994 mission would be his last.

“I’m not promising anybody anything beyond this,” he said. “A spacelab flight is not nearly as sexy as putting on a spacesuit and going outside and grabbing onto satellites and stuff like that. But for me, it’ll kind of fill out the checklist of all the kinds of things that mission specialists can do. I’ll have kind of done everything that we do. I’m not for sure going to quit, but I’m not for sure going to stay either.”

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