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NCAA News Archive - 2010

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Jun 28, 2010 9:39:51 AM

Clayton Anderson took a part of the Men's College World Series to new heights on his mission aboard space shuttle Discovery in April.

Anderson, born in Omaha and raised 30 miles from the home of the CWS in Ashland, Nebraska, received permission from NASA to bring baseballs, T-shirts and hats supplied to him by the NCAA baseball and football staff.

Anderson was honored June 19 on opening day of the 2010 CWS. A video of him playing a game of catch 220 miles above the earth was shown on the video board during the ceremony.

It was one of several honors being bestowed at this year's CWS, which will be played for a final time at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium. The event moves into TD Ameritrade Park Omaha in 2011.

In his youth, Anderson attended the CWS regularly, especially in his high school years.

"Since this is the last one for Rosenblatt, I thought it would be cool to see if we could fly something up there from the CWS as a tribute to Rosenblatt and as anticipation to the new venue," said Anderson, who made three spacewalks on his last space shuttle mission.

 He grew up an all-around athlete in Ashland where he played baseball, basketball, football and track.

While earning his physics degree at Hastings, Anderson lived the life of a student-athlete by competing on the football, basketball and track and field teams. He couldn't continue his baseball career, because Hastings didn't sponsor the sport at the time.

"The adversity you deal with in sports is a wonderful lesson for life," Anderson said. "I tell my son all the time, when something goes wrong in one of his games or something happens negatively, adversity is what you build your experiences on. It makes you stronger in the future and more successful. He is starting to get the idea. Sports provide great training ground for life's future activities."

After graduating in 1981, Anderson went to Iowa State earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering two years later. He joined NASA the same year.

In 1998, he was selected as an astronaut candidate. On one of his missions, he spent 152 days on the International Space Station in 2007.

In April, Anderson made three spacewalks. One of his tasks was to replace components that enable the space station to maintain altitude in orbit. He also had to attach a cargo module that carried supplies to the space station, which is traveling 17,500 mph.

Anderson said a person can't tell is they are traveling at that rate of speed unless they look down at the Earth. So does he look down?

"Absolutely, that is one of the coolest parts," Anderson said.

At the speed he's traveling, it takes 90 minutes to orbit the earth. Anderson said he's seen 16 sunsets and sunrises on one spacewalk.

"You are only attached to the space station by a small wire cable tether," Anderson said. "Imagine you are on the interstate and two cars are driving the same speed. Then you take a wire and hook it to one of the chairs in the car, and you climb out the window and start crawling all over the other car. Now, you get an idea of how it is to do a spacewalk."

Anderson, 51, is firmly planted back on Earth and hopes the people of his home state felt the same pride he had when he took the CWS items into space.

"It's pretty cool that the only astronaut from Nebraska can fly something up there from the College World Series," Anderson said. "I've been so busy training for flight that I hadn't been able to see a College World Series game in a long time."