Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to state that Col. Nick Hague will be first guardian to launch into space, not the first to visit the International Space Station. Previously, Col. Mike Hopkins transferred from Air Force to the Space Force while in space, making him the first guardian in space. 

Col. Nick Hague expects to bring the Space Force spirit and song to the International Space Station as the first guardian to launch into space.

The Space Force song, Semper Sumpra, will literally travel to space as sheet music potentially in August and Hague plans to return it to the band members and composers that worked on the song. He also plans to take flags and patches that will be returned to units, many housed at Peterson and Schriever Space Force Bases that support the station.

Hague and a few crewmembers visited guardians this week that provide critical support, such as tracking debris and guiding the station.

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“Those are the capabilities that underpin us being able to even get to orbit,” he said, during an event Thursday at Peterson Space Force Base.

They visited ahead of training at Sierra Space in Louisville, where they will practice working with the Dream Chaser spaceplane, planned to bring supplies to and from the International Space Station. The crewmembers will get a look inside a high-fidelity mock up to plan for how to pack cargo, he said. Astronauts will also need to learn to use a robotic arm to capture the plane from the space station, likely at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Hague brings experience to the upcoming mission, since this will be his third launch and second trip to the space station. He transferred into the Space Force in 2021.

While he has a general idea of the tasks he will perform on board, much of it is unknown ahead of time.

“It’s almost like Christmas every day up there. Because you’re opening a cargo bag and you’re pulling out a new experiment that you’ve never seen,” he said.

On his last mission, he was 3-D printing human tissue and sequencing DNA, among other tasks.

Some of the general work on the station also includes hardware testing necessary to go back to the moon, he said. NASA hopes to put astronauts on the moon in 2026 as part of a larger plan to go to Mars.

The knowledge gained for the work is priceless, he said.

But not without risk that Hague experienced first hand.

In 2018, the rocket launching Hague and his crewmate Alexey Ovchinin to space disintegrated under them. The escape tower pulled them clear of the rocket and debris, he explained in a NASA video.

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During his next launch five months later in 2019, he said the “butterflies” were the same, partially because of the constant vigilance required in space that requires astronauts to always think about the next thing that could go wrong.

Since his last trip to space Hague worked for the Space Force as it director of test and evaluation at the Pentagon and he hopes to inspire other guardians to follow him to space.

He described the work that guardians do in “complex control rooms, managing dynamic teams trying to handle technical problems” in space as analogous to the work happening at Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center and thus making them good candidates. He knows many people think the standards are so high they won’t be selected, but he advises guardians to try anyway.

“Make us say ‘No.’ Put in an application,” he encouraged.