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2013 college football: 17 odds and ends you might have missed

14. From Urbana-Champaign, Ill., to orbit

REUTERS
US astronaut Michael Hopkins (l.) and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy put on space suits before a training session at the Star City space center outside Moscow, Aug. 23, 2013. Hopkins, along with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Ryazanskiy, are scheduled to be part of a mission to the International Space Station that will launch in September 2013.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Former University of Illinois defensive back Mike Hopkins will be cheered on by the Illini football team in late September when he and five crew mates blast off for the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.  The former Illini football captain says his employer, NASA, is good about making life as normal as possible on long missions such as his six-month Expedition 37-38 journey. “We’re able to request TV shows or anything like that, so of course I’ve requested to make sure I have all of the games,” he says. “I may not get it live, but rest assured, I’ll certainly be watching every game.”

While an aerospace engineering major on the Illinois campus, Hopkins, a native of Lebanon, Mo., was a four-year letter winner, a first-team Academic All-American, and after his 1990 junior season was the recipient of the Bruce Capel Award for being the player who displayed the greatest courage and determination.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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