Nick Hague

Tyler Nicklaus "Nick" Hague was born in 1975 and grew up in Kansas before a career in military aviation carried him toward spaceflight. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, he earned a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became a flight-test engineer and test pilot, later serving on the Department of Defense's Joint Staff. NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2013. His military and space careers would remain intertwined: he became the first active member of the newly created U.S. Space Force to launch into space, and he brought a test pilot's composure to a spaceflight career that would demand it in dramatic fashion.

Hague's path to orbit was interrupted before it began. On 11 October 2018 he and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin launched on Soyuz MS-10, only to suffer a booster failure about two minutes into the flight; the escape system triggered a steep ballistic abort, and the two men rode a violent but survivable descent back to a safe landing — one of the few in-flight launch aborts in the history of human spaceflight. Just five months later Hague returned to the pad and flew Soyuz MS-12 to the station, serving on Expeditions 59 and 60 for roughly 203 days and conducting spacewalks to upgrade the station's power system. His third launch came in September 2024 as commander of SpaceX Crew-9 aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom. That flight had a rare purpose: it launched with only two crew so it could bring home Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the astronauts whose Boeing Starliner test flight had left them without a ride down. Crew-9 splashed down in March 2025 after about 171 days, completing the return.

Hague's legacy rests on resilience and on the quiet reliability of the systems and people around him — he has credited his crewmates and rescue teams rather than dwelling on his own survival of the MS-10 abort. Across his missions he logged several spacewalks and hundreds of days in space, and as a Space Force officer he became a visible link between the U.S. military space enterprise and NASA's human program. He was honored with the Defense Superior Service Medal and NASA's Spaceflight Medal, among others. In late 2025 he transitioned out of the NASA astronaut office to serve full-time as a senior U.S. Space Force officer, closing his flying career while continuing in uniform — an active-service arc that began with a test pilot's discipline and was defined by his calm return from one of spaceflight's most harrowing moments.