Three North Dakotans look to the heavens
By Janell Cole
The Forum - 12/26/1999

North Dakota may be a long way from NASA and Cape Kennedy, but that hasn’t stopped this northern prairie state from putting its mark in space.

North Dakota’s three astronauts and the University of North Dakota’s aerospace program have been busy making a lot of history in a short three decades.

In 1988, Richard Hieb, the Jamestown native who went into space three times, pointed out North Dakota’s bragging rights when he declared that the state had the highest per-capita astronaut complement of any state in the union and was the only state that had as many astronauts as it has members of Congress.

Hieb, James Buchli and Tony England are North Dakota’s three astronauts.

Buchli was born at New Rockford and raised in Fargo. Tony England was born in Indianapolis and went to school in Fargo and West Fargo.

The three North Dakota astronauts flew on missions over a nine-year period beginning with Buchli’s January 1985 space mission for the Department of Defense and ending with Hieb’s third and last trip on the space shuttle Columbia in 1994.

James Buchli

Buchli moved from New Rockford to Fargo with his parents while still a boy. His dad worked for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service and his mother worked at deLendrecies. He graduated from Fargo Central High School in 1963, where he was a state champion wrestler, and from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1967.

Buchli joined the Marine Corps and went to combat duty in Vietnam before entering naval flight officer training.

He became an astronaut in August 1979. He held numerous technical assignments and spent more than 490 hours in space on four missions. The last was a six-day flight on the space shuttle Discovery in 1991.

From 1989 until he left NASA for a job with Boeing Defense and Space Group in 1992, Buchli was deputy chief of the astronaut office.

Tony England

England was born in Indianapolis in 1942 and in 1954 moved to Fargo, where he attended Agassiz Junior High School.

After graduating from West Fargo High School in 1959, England went on to get his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

England first joined the space program in 1967 as a geophysicist. At the time, he was the youngest person admitted to the space program.

His first assignment was on the support crew for Apollo 13 in 1970, the mission known for the “Houston, we have a problem” crisis portrayed in the film “Apollo 13.”

England directed a Mission Control crew that figured out a way to keep the Apollo 13 astronauts from suffocating.

Two years later, he was the voice of the Kennedy Space Center during the Apollo 16 mission to the moon, the only capsule communicator on the ground who talked to astronauts John M. Young and Charles Duke while they were on the moon. He had that position because he had trained the crew in geology in preparation for the moonwalk.

The last Apollo mission was in December 1972 and England had to give up for a while on his dream to go into space.

He left NASA for a seven-year period, teaching at Rice University, then rejoined the space corps for the shuttle program. He didn’t go into space until he was 43 years old.

It was in the summer 1985, about six months after Buchli became the first North Dakotan in space, when England went on a mission in the space shuttle Challenger, the same ship that several months later was lost in a tragic accident, along with its seven-member crew.

England went on to manage a mission development team for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. In 1988, he left NASA to become a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan.

Hieb remembers watching the 1969 moon landing on a television set at his grandmother’s house in Jamestown, because his own parents didn’t have a television. He was 13 years old

Though the event was exciting, Hieb never imagined at the time that he would ever go into space because he wore glasses. At the time, only fighter pilots – who must have perfect vision – were selected as astronauts.

Luckily for him, the space program years later began adding mission specialists who did not have to have 20-20 vision.

And the program began employing civilians. Unlike Buchli and England, Hieb did not go to the space program from the military.

Hieb was in graduate school at the University of Colorado when he saw an advertisement for a summer job at NASA and got it. After a summer of design work on insulation of loads carried in a space shuttle’s payload bay, he returned to school. After graduating in 1979, he got rehired by NASA as a procedures writer in rendezvous and proximity operations.

He then realized he could aspire to be an astronaut and was selected in 1985. He spent more than 754 hours in space on three flights between 1991 and 1994.

On his second mission, in 1992, Hieb was one of three astronauts who grabbed an errant 4.5-ton communications satellite by hand, repaired it and sent it back into a proper orbit.

He also made history as part of the first three-person space walk, part of the longest space walk in history, nearly 8½ hours.

Hieb eventually ran up 17 hours of space walks.

In a 1995 speech to students at Moorhead’s Robert Asp School, Hieb told them he didn’t get to be an astronaut because his parents were wealthy or because he knew someone in Washington, D.C.

“In America, you can be whatever you want to be,” he said.