Christina Koch is a world-famous astronaut, deeply respected as an electrical engineer and beloved as one of the four members of the Artemis II mission to circumvent the moon. In 2001, she was a recent NC State graduate and brand new employee at NASA.
In her five years at NC State, Koch earned two bachelor’s of sciences, in physics and electrical engineering, and her master’s in electrical engineering. During her time, she was featured in Technician as a blood donor and photographer.
After graduating, she took a job as an electrical engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Laboratory just outside of Washington, where she developed space science instruments. The next decade of her life was spent conducting research in remote locations, such as Antarctica, Alaska, Samoa and Greenland.
As a member of NASA’s 21st class of astronauts in 2013, Koch was one of four women in an eight person class. In an interview with Technician in 2013, Koch said the history-making ratio was a testament to the amount of multi-talented women in science.
“The playing field is becoming more level, and women are now in the position to really excel and follow their own dreams,” Koch said.
After 328 days aboard the International Space Station, the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, and the first three all-female spacewalks alongside Jessica Meir, Koch returned home and shortly began training for Artemis II.
Out of the Artemis II team, Koch is the only member with no military accreditations, but makes up for it with her diverse and extensive engineering experience in the field. As mission specialist, she manages on-board experiments and handles equipment operations.
NASA’s Artemis II mission launched on April 1 and took four astronauts further from our planet then any human in history – 252,756 miles away at the furthest point. They safely returned home on April 10, and the trial and errors of this mission will pave the way for more space exploration in the very near future.
“Part of our ethos as a crew, and our values from the very beginning were that this is a relay race,” Koch said while on the 10-day mission. “In fact, we have batons that we bought to symbolize physically, that we plan to hand them to the next crew, and every single thing that we do is with them in mind.”
Koch will undoubtedly go down in NC State’s history as one the most influential and successful people to ever come out of the institution, and it’s safe to assume she is not done.
Read more about Koch’s journey from State to space in this timeline.
