Nick Hague spent 20 years dreaming of getting into space, first as an Air Force test pilot, then as a NASA astronaut since 2013. He got his big chance to blast into orbit last Friday aboard a Soyuz spacecraft launching from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin were expecting a routine six-hour flight to the International Space Station, but two minutes after liftoff, something went wrong.

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