{"id":916958,"date":"2026-10-01T19:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T19:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/916958\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T19:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T19:54:09","slug":"i-dont-really-believe-it-yet-canadas-joshua-kutryk-and-crew-13-astronauts-on-their-way-to-iss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/916958\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I don’t really believe it yet’: Canada’s Joshua Kutryk and Crew-13 astronauts on their way to ISS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kutryk’s Grade 6 teacher in Florida for launch<\/p>\n

Kutryk’s family was there to watch him launch into space \u2014 as was his Grade 6 teacher, Ted Hup\u00e9, whom he’s called an inspiration.<\/p>\n

Hup\u00e9 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“In some ways, I’m not surprised this happened,” said Hup\u00e9, who taught Kutryk in Whitehorse, where he and his family spent five years before returning to Alberta.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The two stayed in touch over the years. In 2010, when Hup\u00e9 was a principal at a school in Whitehorse, Kutryk \u2014 then a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot \u2014 called him unexpectedly.<\/p>\n

“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,” Hup\u00e9 recalled in a 2017 interview with CBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kutryk told his former teacher he was flying over the school and invited him to meet for coffee after landing. Hup\u00e9 picked up his children and went to see the aircraft.<\/p>\n

“We got to climb onto his aircraft and take a look at things and it was just a wonderful experience,” he said.<\/p>\n

Kutryk told CBC News decades later that he had been inspired by Hup\u00e9 as a young student.<\/p>\n

At the time, Hup\u00e9 had recently moved to Yukon after spending a year travelling around the world, including trekking in Nepal and cycling through New Zealand and India.<\/p>\n

“I’d tell them stories about cycling, about travelling, and I’d teach the kids how to tear apart a bicycle and rebuild it,” Hup\u00e9 recalled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kutryk has credited those stories with igniting “this exploratory sense, the explorer within me, that has really been there for the whole ride \u2014 the last 30 years,” he said.<\/p>\n

Now, about a decade after Kutryk landed outside his window in Whitehorse, Hup\u00e9 was watching his former student prepare to leave Earth altogether.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kutryk’s Grade 6 teacher in Florida for launch Kutryk’s family was there to watch him launch into space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":916959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,66,306],"class_list":["post-916958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}