NASA astronaut Christina Koch is set to become the first woman to go around the moon when NASA's Artemis II mission takes off next year. Koch will fly on Artemis II with three other astronauts
Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013, Koch served as flight engineer on the International Space Station (ISS) for Expedition 59, 60 and 61. Koch set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space and participated in the first all-female spacewalks
Koch is a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina and resided in Livingston, Montana when she was selected to join the Astronaut Corps, according to the NASA website
Koch attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she earned Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. She received an Honorary Ph.D. from North Carolina State University
Prior to becoming an astronaut, Koch's career spanned both space science instrument development and remote scientific field engineering. Her career began as an Electrical Engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)
In 2001, Koch participated in the NASA Academy program at Goddard Space Flight Center and worked as an electrical engineer there. In 2013, she was selected as one of eight members of the 21st NASA astronaut class and completed Astronaut Candidate training in 2015
She made her first space flight in 2019 aboard the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Koch conducted six spacewalks, including the first three all women spacewalks, totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes. She has spent a total of 328 days in space
The four astronauts, including Koch, will venture around the Moon as part of Artemis II, in order to demonstrate that all of Orion's life-support apparatus and other systems will operate as designed with astronauts aboard in the actual environment of deep space
Christina Koch will become the first woman astronaut ever assigned to a lunar mission, while Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut to voyage into deep space. They will join Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen