Kutryk’s Grade 6 teacher in Florida for launch
Kutryk’s family was there to watch him launch into space — as was his Grade 6 teacher, Ted Hupé, whom he’s called an inspiration.
Hupé travelled to Florida to watch his former student make his journey into space. Speaking to CBC News Network, he said that even as a 12-year-old in 1994, it was clear Kutryk was driven and he already wanted to become a pilot.
“In some ways, I’m not surprised this happened,” said Hupé, who taught Kutryk in Whitehorse, where he and his family spent five years before returning to Alberta.
The two stayed in touch over the years. In 2010, when Hupé was a principal at a school in Whitehorse, Kutryk — then a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot — called him unexpectedly.
“He gave me a call and he said, ‘Look out your window.’ I look out my window and there’s an F-18 flying by,” Hupé recalled in a 2017 interview with CBC.
Kutryk told his former teacher he was flying over the school and invited him to meet for coffee after landing. Hupé picked up his children and went to see the aircraft.
“We got to climb onto his aircraft and take a look at things and it was just a wonderful experience,” he said.
Kutryk told CBC News decades later that he had been inspired by Hupé as a young student.
At the time, Hupé had recently moved to Yukon after spending a year travelling around the world, including trekking in Nepal and cycling through New Zealand and India.
“I’d tell them stories about cycling, about travelling, and I’d teach the kids how to tear apart a bicycle and rebuild it,” Hupé recalled.
Kutryk has credited those stories with igniting “this exploratory sense, the explorer within me, that has really been there for the whole ride — the last 30 years,” he said.
Now, about a decade after Kutryk landed outside his window in Whitehorse, Hupé was watching his former student prepare to leave Earth altogether.