Boise elementary students chat with astronauts on the International Space Station

By Samantha Wright

Published January 8, 2025 at 1:33 PM MST

(Nov. 1, 2024) -- The International Space Station soared 264 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Uruguay as this photograph was taken.

When astronaut Suni Williams climbed into the International Space Station last June, she was planning to be back on earth a week later.

But problems cropped up with the spacecraft “Starliner” which was supposed to take Williams and she's been in space for the last eight months.

Her unexpected stay has brought extra attention to the station’s “Expedition 72” mission, which began in September, where astronauts have been working on everything from genetic sequencing to life support systems in space.

(Dec. 19, 2024) --- Roscosmos cosmonaut and Expedition 72 Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin is maneuvered using the European robotic arm during a seven-hour and 17-minute spacewalk. He and fellow Flight Engineer Ivan Vagner (not pictured) partnered together in the vacuum of space on Dec.19 installing a celestial X-ray experiment and removng other scientific hardware on the exterior of the International Space Station. The waning gibbous Moon is at lower right as the orbital outpost soared 262 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

So how do things work on the ISS? Turns out, students from Boise’s Hawthorne Elementary will get a chance to find out when they sit down to chat with one of the astronauts on the space station, to ask them about the mission and about life in space.

Kellie Taylor is a third-grade teacher at Hawthorne and she’s been working hard to get her kids a chance to talk to astronauts. Sawyer Cantrill is a 3rd grade student at Hawthorne and wants to know if it's easy to walk in space wearing a 280 pound spacesuit?

(Dec. 9, 2024) --- NASA astronaut and Expedtion 72 Flight Engineer Don Pettit took this photograph of a U.S. spacesuit helmet with his reflection prominent on the helmet's visor inside the International Space Station's Quest airlock.

The students will likely be chatting with NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Donald R. Pettit. He’s part of the Expedition 72 crew and is spending six months in space doing research and keeping the ISS running smoothly. That’s a big job, since fixing things that go wrong in space can be tricky, like the time a beam got stuck on a spacewalk and Pettit had to find the best way to get it loose:

Pettit’s been in space before and has spent more than a year on the ISS, so he’ll have a lot of background knowledge to share with Hawthorne Elementary.

You can watch the space chat live as the students quiz astronauts on the ISS.

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