By Carl Voelcker

FSU Foundation

When astronaut Norm Thagard blasted off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, the first American aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, he took along with him a little bit of his alma mater, Florida State University.

It all began last fall, at FSU's homecoming football game. The university was host to Thagard and two of his Russian colleagues, with whom he would spend several months aboard the Russian Mir space station.

The two Russians, Gennady Strekalov and Vladimir Dezhurov, witnessed their first American football game and donned their new FSU caps along with Thagard on the sidelines during the game.

Cheryl Sumners, director of donor relations for the FSU Foundation, was assigned to make sure Thagard and the Russians were where they were supposed to be, and on time, during their busy weekend visit. They came to FSU on leave from three weeks of intensive training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Shortly after their visit, the three space explorers returned to Russia's Starr City to complete their training. Sumners had sent Thagard and the cosmonauts a videotape of the highlights of the game they had seen.

"I just thought Norm would like to see a little more football, so I began sending him videos of all the other FSU football games," Sumners said. "I called Norm to see if he wanted me to tape the Super Bowl for him. He said he did, and then asked if I could send him something of FSU that was very light weight, so I sent an FSU pennant to him through NASA to Russia."

A few days after the successful launch of the Soyuz rocket, with Thagard safely aboard the Russian space station, a HAM radio operator in South Carolina sent Sumner a thank-you message from the astronaut: "Hello. Things are going well. Thanks for the pennant."

"They broadcast live a news conference from the space station, and there was the pennant in the background," Sumners said. "Then I got a call from another HAM operator, this time from Boston, with another message from Norm, repeating his thanks since he wasn't sure I had gotten the first one. He also said that Gennady had told him to put the pennant in the background where they were shooting the news conference, so that people could see it all over the world."

Thagard will have broken all American space endurance records when he returns earth aboard the space shuttle Atlantis on July 1. On a previous mission, Thagard carried a class-of-1945 freshman beanie into orbit aboard the shuttle Discovery. He is a member of the FSU class of 1965.