Jonesboro, AR – Jonesboro Right Now – Sixteen Nettleton students spoke with an International Space Station (ISS) astronaut via amateur radio on Monday as it zoomed over Earth at roughly 17,500 miles per hour.

The contact was part of Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS), a group of more than 15 countries that seeks to engage students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and connecting them with ISS astronauts.

Nettleton University Heights School of Medical Arts (UHSMA) students made contact with Joshua Kutryk, a Canadian astronaut part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission. He, along with the rest of his crew, arrived at the ISS on Oct. 1, according to his biography.

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The astronaut-to-student contact lasted approximately 10 minutes while the ISS was above Italy, with each of the students asking Kutryk questions about topics such as ISS life, what a spacewalk is like, and more. In addition to hearing Kutyrk over the radio, students also saw a livestream of him in the space station as he answered their questions.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, where everyone gets to talk to an astronaut live, and on top of that, we weren’t just communicating with Ham radio, we got to see them,” said Haley Bagwell, EAST facilitator at UHSMA.

Bagwell said the plan for the contact came about because of her students, Hudson Barker, wanted to be an engineer for NASA. She heard about an EAST facilitator initiating an ARISS contact at a school in Northwest Arkansas, and, along with Barker and his partner Kinsley Martin, applied for a contact at Nettleton. The school found out in December it had been accepted.

Barker, a 7th grader at Nettleton, was one of the students who got to ask Kuytrk a question. He said that despite Kutryk being a “famous person,” he didn’t want to overreact when he asked his question.

“From my perspective, we’re all people, so, like, if there’s a famous person, I’m not gonna overreact,” Barker said. “But they’re in space, and I always thought that space was cool, so that was kind of cool to talk to a person in space.”

He added that Monday’s contact made him want to be a NASA engineer “a lot more.”

Martin, also a Nettleton 7th grader, said she’d had an interest in space since learning about it in the fourth grade. She was another one of the 16 students who asked a question.

“It was just really cool to hear his voice the first time,” she said.

Devion Carter, a 6th grader, also asked a question. He said he was nervous because he’d “never [done] this before,” and added that it felt “good” to say he’d spoken with an astronaut.

Bagwell said she hoped Monday’s events inspired students.

“This was just an opportunity to let students know, dream big, you can do whatever you put your mind to, and I hope this contact was just the start of a big dream for some of our kids,” she said.

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