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NASA Spotlight: Astronaut Mike Hopkins

Michael S. Hopkins was selected by NASA as an astronaut in 2009. The Missouri native is currently the Crew-1 mission commander for NASA’s next SpaceX launch to the International Space Station on Nov. 14, 2020. Hopkin’s Crew-1 mission will mark the first-ever crew rotation flight of a U.S. commercial spacecraft with astronauts on board, and it secures the U.S.’s ability to launch humans into space from American soil once again.  Previously, Hopkins was member of the Expedition 37/38 crew and has logged 166 days in space. During his stay aboard the station, he conducted two spacewalks totaling 12 hours and 58 minutes to change out a degraded pump module. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering. 

He took some time from being a NASA astronaut to answer questions about his life and career! Enjoy:

What do you hope people think about when you launch?

I hope people are thinking about the fact that we’re starting a new era in human spaceflight. We’re re-opening human launch capability to U.S. soil again, but it’s not just that. We’re opening low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station with commercial companies. It’s a lot different than what we’ve done in the past. I hope people realize this isn’t just another launch – this is something a lot bigger. Hopefully it’s setting the stage, one of those first steps to getting us to the Moon and on to Mars.

You served in the U.S. Air Force as a flight test engineer. What does that entail?

First off, just like being an astronaut, it involves a lot of training when you first get started. I went to the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and spent a year in training and just learning how to be a flight test engineer. It was one of the most challenging years I’ve ever had, but also one of the more rewarding years. What it means afterwards is, you are basically testing new vehicles or new systems that are going on aircraft. You are testing them before they get handed over to the operational fleet and squadrons. You want to make sure that these capabilities are safe, and that they meet requirements. As a flight test engineer, I would help design the test. I would then get the opportunity to go and fly and execute the test and collect the data, then do the analysis, then write the final reports and give those conclusions on whether this particular vehicle or system was ready to go.

What is one piece of life advice you wish somebody had told you when you were younger? 

A common theme for me is to just have patience. Enjoy the ride along the way. I think I tend to be pretty high intensity on things and looking back, I think things happen when they’re supposed to happen, and sometimes that doesn’t necessarily agree with when you think it should happen. So for me, someone saying, “Just be patient Mike, it’s all going to happen when it’s supposed to,” would be really good advice.

Is there a particular science experiment you enjoyed working on the most while aboard the space station?

There’s a lot of experiments I had the opportunity to participate in, but the ones in particular I liked were ones where I got to interact directly with the folks that designed the experiment. One thing I enjoyed was a fluid experiment called Capillary Flow Experiment, or CFE. I got to work directly with the principal investigators on the ground as I executed that experiment. What made it nice was getting to hear their excitement as you were letting them know what was happening in real time and getting to hear their voices as they got excited about the results. It’s just a lot of fun.

Space is a risky business. Why do it?

I think most of us when we think about whatever it is we do, we don’t think of it in those terms. Space is risky, yes, but there’s a lot of other risky jobs out there. Whether it’s in the military, farming, jobs that involve heavy machinery or dangerous equipment… there’s all kinds of jobs that entail risk. Why do it? You do it because it appeals to you. You do it because it’s what gets you excited. It just feels right. We all have to go through a point in our lives where we figure out what we want to do and what we want to be. Sometimes we have to make decisions based on factors that maybe wouldn’t lead you down that choice if you had everything that you wanted, but in this particular case for me, it’s exactly where I want to be. From a risk standpoint, I don’t think of it in those terms.

Can you describe your crew mate Soichi Noguchi in one sentence?

There are many facets to Soichi Noguchi. I’m thinking about the movie Shrek. He has many layers! He’s very talented. He’s very well-thought. He’s very funny. He’s very caring. He’s very sensitive to other people’s needs and desires. He’s a dedicated family man. I could go on and on and on… so maybe like an onion – full of layers!

Star Trek or Star Wars?

I love them both. But can I say Firefly? There’s a TV series out there called Firefly. It lasted one season – kind of a space cowboy-type show. They did have a movie, Serenity, that was made as well. But anyway, I love both Star Wars and Star Trek. We’ve really enjoyed The Mandalorian. I mean who doesn’t love Baby Yoda right? It’s all fun.

How many times did you apply to be an astronaut? Did you learn anything on your last attempt? 

I tried four times over the course of 13 years. My first three attempts, I didn’t even have references checked or interviews or anything. Remember what we talked about earlier, about patience? For my fourth attempt, the fact is, it happened when it was supposed to happen. I didn’t realize it at the time. I would have loved to have been picked on my first attempt like anybody would think, but at the same time, because I didn’t get picked right away, my family had some amazing experiences throughout my Air Force career. That includes living in Canada, living overseas in Italy, and having an opportunity to work at the Pentagon. All of those helped shape me and grow my experience in ways that I think helped me be a better astronaut.

Can you share your favorite photo or video that you took in space?

One of my favorite pictures was a picture inside the station at night when all of the lights were out. You can see the glow of all of the little LEDs and computers and things that stay on even when you turn off the overhead lights. You see this glow on station. It’s really one of my favorite times because the picture doesn’t capture it all. I wish you could hear it as well. I like to think of the station in some sense as being alive. It’s at that time of night when everybody else is in their crew quarters in bed and the lights are out that you feel it. You feel the rhythm, you feel the heartbeat of the station, you see it in the glow of those lights – that heartbeat is what’s keeping you alive while you’re up there. That picture goes a small way of trying to capture that, but I think it’s a special time from up there.

What personal items did you decide to pack for launch and why? 

My wedding bands. I’m also taking up pilot wings for my son. He wants to be a pilot so if he succeeds with that, I’ll be able to give him his pilot wings. Last time, I took one of the Purple Hearts of a very close friend. He was a Marine in World War II who earned it after his service in the Pacific.

Thank you for your time, Mike, and good luck on your historic mission! Get to know a bit more about Mike and his Crew-1 crew mates Victor Glover, Soichi Noguchi, and Shannon Walker in the video above.

Watch LIVE launch coverage beginning at 3:30 p.m. EST on Nov. 14 HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com 

it's a small win for trans rights. kind of. but in reality, i'm sure they just want to make it so they can recruit as many people as possible and don't really give a shit whether it's a hetero-cis person or lgbtq person who dies for the imperialist death machine. they just need healthy bodies.

U.S. Marines with Black Sea Rotational Force 18.1 during a patrolling exercise at U.S. Army base Nova Selo Forward Operating Site, Bulgaria, May 10, 2018.  (U.S. Marine Corps photo by LCpl. Angel D. Travis)

I drew the RAH-66 Comanche

I know the orange coloring would affect its stealth but I like the color. :)

How to fully solve what happened to Malaysian Flight m370, what to do, how to put it together & why it works, together with if the US military ever shot it down & or it was some s*ici*e situation

so for Flight m370, I would like to comb through all given underwater sonar, ocean floor sound wave measuring devices, I would need any willing civilian, commercial, & military data for satellite, on ground weather, weather satellite, other planes wifi, radar, etc, boats radar, wifi, etc data, together with sound wave propagation data for a flying plane that size as it creates its given pressure wave (which those can be much much more numerous as they track volcanos & other such things for even smaller asteroid/meteorites that explode in our upper atmosphere, together with particles hitting our upper atmosphere creating specific soundwave styles) same for any given light sensor/detectors for satellites & on the ground based sensors & detectors, same for ocean/sea buoys that do the same thing.

The flight happens to create specific waves that, with the given weather mapping data, can only have attenuated out in a highly understood & able to be fully calculated manner, from here that gives us the schlieren imaging we need for higher altitude & reflective light interference models needed from radar satellite mapping of all waves that gain higher fidelity through ocean buoys, sonar, & soundwave mapping. From here, we gain movement data, that we filter from position to position, working forwards to backwards, us gain a position in front of the plane to the position where is was for a change of given total pressure differences specifically so that way the higher fidelity wave mapping gets used for reflective, defractive, & refractive filtering for interference frequencies for closer to the air plane capture of different air pressure mapping, that lines up with soundwave captures from further away that now line up with the planes most probable positioning.

From this positioning we gain light reflection & absorption of the plane, radar/wifi wise changes the reflection but also how much, as it moves through the air & its given shape, absorbs different wifi & so on signals. Think doppler shifts for wifi that now get reflected because its moving as fast as it is. This means it interferes with the given wifi signal heading towards it to shift signal db mapping. That mapping gives you specific location triangulation, which matches the probable plane positioning. This positioning then gains greater probability. This probability then gains exacting attenuation of heat & air movement soundwave mapping with light wave alterations (interferences, heat, densities, & electrostatic electromagnetic effects) that give you exacting color likeliness as well, from satellites & simple boat/other airplane data, to even the buoys together with how light & sound mapping for particle collisions in our upper atmosphere are detected & sensed.

From here we gain a pinpoint location of the airplane & all given people around involved. To the point, where yes as weird as it is for you all, you can vibrationally see & know lightwave interference wise the people inside as well, even some conversations had if they were loud enough. The detail & fidelity is harder as that requires better & more accurate data with larger amounts to help. But! you can get blobs of people to even good shaping provided it, in those moments, has enough data to correct the fuzziness of the movement & so on.

Anyways, this (without gov't military data) can put this to rest as to what & where it all went & had happened. To be clear & fair, the military for sure, mostly likely several of them, have satellite data that could easily pick out what was going on with this flight. They could conclusively say it was shot down or not. A big poofy fireball isn't hard to see on even older crappy satellites. But so too, for that soundwave sonar data. They can all act as triangulation points, to what happen & when. Even for it flying, but that's been de-noised data for earthquake, boat, whales, & more data mapping for a long time now. They are extremely sensitive, for what its worth.

Which, has me thinking the military could, unfortunately, very well be involved. But this would easily clear it up, if it was the case they never were.

Scary sidenote, at all times this is data & easily calculated & used data being created all the time & used all the time by corporations, gov't, military, & more. In fact, hackers & regular people can get access to it with no trouble. A few routers & a few cell phones & you have many ways to listen to people from a few houses down without having any issues what-so-ever, like many people believe you would. You can absolutely see inside of peoples homes. Because its "bleeding edge" for consumers its not for people with money & an incentive to use it. I.e. your gov't & military that like to spy on the rest of the world, to even their citizens with almost impunity. Hackers, truthfully, haven't really not been able to & they just like playing around to and or using it to their advantage all the same. You are always watched, always listened to, always manipulated & always being turned into something for something, for whatever reason it is for whomever it is. It's why I know they were listening to me almost a decade ago & why I know a level of constant verbatim studies that I said should work out the way they are written in the studies that have kept steadily coming out are mine, to multiple youtube videos, to too many different things.

Those calculations aren't terribly hard now, they are github opensource de-noising, interference, wifi beam forming, radar beam forming, soundwave interference for voice to de-humming, etc programs. All of them can even be found in most graphics cards tools for voice amping, clarity, to making the video look a little more detailed, colorful, blurry, so on & so on. Effectively, all of this has been around for more than 2 decades & only gotten faster & better for even larger data models that now can use large language modeling, neural networking, "multiple dimension" neural networking (chatgpt stuff), branch networking (then logic branch networks that just use dimension neural networks that have it head to a more specific neural network model to make it faster to calculate larger data sets faster), & even simple old school chaos theory mathematical programming, which can now take advantage of the protein folding stuff like deepmind/alphafolding stuff.

This means, its extremely easy, it would be possible to do on your standard mid-tier phone, although it would take like 30min or something, but still nothing that bad. So, yes, for people & cars, planes, & more to be tracked & hunted down by your gov't its easier than ever. But that's real time data stuff, so everything is usually behind about 3-30 mins. This is old data, this would take like a few minutes to fully calculate & brute force everything until you have more than enough to know if the military shot flight m370 down & or they didn't, while then you can comb through all data of them online & around & know how much it was planned & what they were saying outloud, writing on papers (its that good yes) to any number of events leading up to the tragedy. Fully removing the mystery of the flight & what happened.

That's why I would do first, for that one. Then second, after doing it, I would let you watch it all & make for conclusions & resolutions to find closure for it all & know what you need to know. While also giving you a horrifying glimpse into all those with money & power; what they intend to do to you with it & why you shouldn't think its okay unless you don't live in America as it is now.