Puerto Rican astronaut Joseph Acabá lifts off into space as part of a team that will conduct research at the International Space Station. He won’t return to Earth until later next year.
Puerto Rican astronaut Joseph Acabá blasted off into space Tuesday as part of a team that will conduct research at the International Space Station.
This is the third trip into space for Acabá, and his second trip to the ISS.
He will be joined by Mark Vande Hei, a member of NASA and Virginia native; and Alexander Misurkin, a Russian who is part of the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities.
According to NASA, the team will spend about five and a half months in space to conduct Expeditions 53 and 54.
They replaced the team headed by Peggy Whitson, the astronaut who has accumulated the greatest amount of time spent in space — 665 days — after returning Sept. 2. She was joined by Jack Fisher and Fyodor Yurchikhin.
Acabá, Vande Hei and Misurkin took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan about 5:17 p.m. in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The journey, at maximum speed, was completed in about six hours.
The team will lead experiments already underway in the only orbital laboratory, including investigations in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.
The ISS, a research center inside the Earth’s orbit, has been in space for 6,871 days — almost 19 years.
Acabá and his team are scheduled to return to Earth in February.
Who’s Joseph Acabá?
The Puerto Rican astronaut, whose parents are originally from Hatillo, was one of three professors chosen to be an astronaut by NASA in May 2004.
That same summer, he moved from Dunnellon in Marion County — a town of about 1,900 people where he had lived since 1998 — to Houston, a city with more than 2 million people.
In fall 2004, instead of going to the middle school where he taught science and math, he went to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center to finish his training.
His first trip was in 2009 on the Discovery STS-119, and in 2012, he returned to the ISS for Expeditions 31 and 32.
He was born in Inglewood, Calif., and raised in Anaheim. Acabá has a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of California in Santa Barbara; a master’s in geology from the University of Arizona; and another one in education, curriculum and instruction from Texas Tech University.
According to his biography provided by NASA, before becoming an astronaut, he spent time in the U.S. Reserves and the Peace Corps; worked as a hydrogeologist; and taught in middle and high school. Translation by Bianca Padró Ocasio.