You know Anne McClain. Now meet the rest of the astronauts from Crew-10
Editor’s note: Spokesman-Review reporter Nick Gibson is in Florida this week to report on Anne McClain’s and NASA’s SpaceX launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Follow along in print and online at spokesman.com/sections/return-to-space.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – There’s an old adage that says if you want to go fast, you go alone. But if you want to go far, you go together.
It’s a sentiment that NASA Astronaut Anne McClain, 45, believes in wholeheartedly. The 1997 Gonzaga Prep grad has repeated the phrase frequently in her interviews, speeches and social media posts over the years.
While Spokanites admire and embrace their Lilac City hero, they’re likely less familiar with McClain’s companions for her trip to the stars. Rounding out the rest of Crew-10 are NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi. Crew-10 is the 10th SpaceX mission to the ISS.
Crew-10’s takeoff aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for Wednesday at 4:48 p.m. Pacific and will be live cast on the free streaming service, NASA+.
To McClain’s point, traveling a great distance might be easier with four trained pilots on the team.
“Anne and I are both military pilots, but then Tak and Kirill are commercial pilots for their respective countries,” Ayers said in a prelaunch interview on NASA’s Houston We Have a Podcast. “And it’s, I think, enhanced our ability to work together as a team.”
In a news conference Friday, Ayers said the Crew-10 patch and mission symbol pay homage to their backgrounds, depicting a large dragon with its open wings encircling the globe and its eye trained on the ISS. Large gold entry and entry trails cross below, forming the Roman numeral X. The 10-sided patch is peppered with red, white and blue stars, an homage to the flags of the countries they hail from.
Ayers said the crew started with some AI prompts and generated images, before sitting down with a living artist to flesh out the final design.
“There’s all sorts of meaning in the patch,” Ayers said. “So it was just kind of a booster for the brainstorm, which then kick-started our discussion as a crew on what we wanted in the patch.”
Nichole ‘Vapor’ Ayers, mission pilot
Ayers’ callsign stems from the trail the Air Force Major would leave behind as one of few women to pilot an F-22 Raptor, according to NASA.
Born in San Diego but raised at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Divide, Colorado, Ayers, 36, credits growing up next to the Air Force Academy for instilling a desire to fly. She always had an interest in space and would follow shuttle launches. She said her heart was set on being the astronaut behind the wheel of a shuttle as soon as she learned it was a possibility.
“One of my favorite parts about growing up in Colorado is the exploring, and the ability to go hiking and camping and kind of figuring out how to live in austere places, which has turned out to be a great analog for what we’re training to do here,” she said.
Ayers, who has a twin sister, graduated with academic honors from the Air Force Academy in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, before going on to earn a master’s degree in computational and applied mathematics from Rice University in Houston. Like McClain, she’s a service member and former collegiate athlete, receiving Mountain West Conference academic honors all four years she competed on the Thunderbirds’ volleyball team.
“As a F-22 pilot, we were kind of on the operational tip of the spear in the military,” Ayers said. “And now we get to go do things that are on the operational tip of the spear for humanity, and go out into the vacuum of space in a space suit that is basically like a small spacecraft.”
Selected as an astronaut in December 2021, Ayers will be the first graduate of her astronaut class to serve on a mission. In her podcast interview, she said she’s excited to participate in research that touches on her computational fluid dynamics background, including combustion studies and some on irrigation and plant growth, like one headed by a Washington State University professor exploring alfalfa growth.
Like many of those who came before her, she also looks forward to seeing how her perspective changes with the view of the globe from the ISS.
“I’m excited to share the experience with this team, but also to see the team that we are on the ground,” Ayers said. “You know, there are no borders. You can’t see borders from the space station, so I’m excited to see how all of us individuals form into one world while we’re up there.”
Kirill Peskov, mission specialist
The Crew-10 mission will also be Peskov’s first spaceflight, after being selected as a cosmonaut in 2017.
The Russian pilot came to Roscosmos as a commercial pilot, flying Boeing–757s and 767s. He credits that career path to his parents; his mother was a meteorologist and his father was a pilot while growing up in Kyzyl, Russia, a Siberian town about half the size of Spokane.
Peskov, 34, said he’s greatly enjoyed getting to know the rest of Crew-10, and that their shared backgrounds helped them find their groove .
“It helps us a lot to make our communication nice and smooth inside the cabin during nominal and off-nominal procedures during training,” Peskov said.
While soft spoken in most American media interviews, Peskov shared a fair amount with the space agency’s media team. He made a point to credit his family for helping him get to where he is. He’s always been curious about the world around him, and his parents and grandparents encouraged him to keep his inquisitive nature well into adulthood.
“My parents and grandparents inspired me,” Peskov told NASA podcast host Joseph Zakrzewski. “They didn’t want me to become a cosmonaut, they just helped to satisfy my curiosity around this world, and they didn’t kill it when I was little. I think in some aspects, I still stay like a child, and that’s what helps to go along on this way.”
Peskov plans to take a toy turtle with him on the voyage, so he can snap a photo of the curve of the Earth aligning with the shell, to disprove a friend back home who adamantly believes the world is flat, he said.
“I want to … send this picture to him, and then bring this turtle with this picture,” Peskov said. “So it’s some kind of like, trolling, or whatever. And also, I think it will be a nice present.”
While he’s not sure how the experience might impact him on a personal level, he’s sure he will walk away with takeaways for future missions. He hopes to wind up working alongside McClain, Ayers and Onishi again one day.
“I think this is the basic thing that makes us humans, this curiosity and the hunger for exploration,” Peskov said.
Takuya Onishi, mission specialist
Onishi and McClain are the seasoned space travelers of the bunch, and while they’ve done their best to impart wisdom on their teammates, Onishi said a lot has changed in the nearly nine years he was last aboard the International Space Station on Expedition 48 and 49. (Wednesday’s launch start the beginning of Expedition 73.)
“I’m sure there will be a lot of progress in our operational systems, as well as our research,” Onishi said.
Prior experience also means he knows what to come prepared with, as he shared in a news conference Friday.
“I found that food is really important to relieve our stress and also make our team bonded together more strongly,” Onishi said. “So I’m bringing some Japanese food to be able to share with my crew members, and also so that I can get some joy or relief from my routine work onboard the station.”
Onishi, 49, grew up in Nerima, a ward of Tokyo, and holds a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Tokyo. He spent years flying Boeing 767s as a commercial pilot before being selected as an astronaut candidate in 2009. He holds the unique distinction of being a certified flight director for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in addition to an astronaut, which he said has provided him with an intimate understanding of both sides of ISS operations.
Onishi is also a “cavenaut” and “aquanaut.” The former title comes from participating in training with the European Space Agency, while the latter stems from a six-day stay at the only underwater research lab, Aquarius. Located six stories below the surface in the Florida Keys, Onishi and his crew visited in 2011 to test different ways to explore an asteroid, but their time below the water was cut short by Hurricane Rina.
McClain will pass the title of commander over to Onishi once aboard the station, something he said he takes great pride in and responsibility for.
“I have already built a strong trust and also confidence in my crewmates, because they are so capable, and we are all pilots,” Onishi said.
He added that the team is used to quickly responding to “emerging situations.”
“Even if the situation then deviates from our standard procedures, I already saw a couple of times that each crew member responded to that new situation, kind of swapping their roles independently,” Onishi said. “So I’m super confident in my crewmates.”
McClain said what really stayed with her from her last stay aboard the station was “the level of technical proficiency that you have to operate in every single day, but at the same time, how much you rely on your crew members.”
She said as soon as the crew was named, she reflected on the lifelong bonds she made with her previous ISS teammates.
“They’re my brothers and sisters,” McClain said. “I still get a huge smile on my face every time I see them in the hallway, and I realize these are the people that I’m going to build that same relationship with while we all get to, one, live out a dream, and two, we get to be the operators on this amazing equipment, both flying up there on a SpaceX Dragon and being part of the space station crew.
“I’m just really humbled by the magnitude of the experience.”