Christina Koch
A record-breaking astronaut who could be one of the first women to step foot on the Moon
Koch is an inspirational, record-breaking NASA astronaut who might one day make it to the Moon. On 9 January 2020, Koch celebrated her 300th day in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS). By the time she landed back on Earth on 6 February, she had broken the record for the longest time spent in space by a woman. But that’s not her only historic achievement. Just a few months prior, Koch and another female astronaut, Jessica Meir, completed the first all-woman spacewalk.
Koch was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina. From a young age she wanted to be an astronaut, joining her middle school’s ‘Rocket Club’. Trips to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida only solidified that dream. Koch attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh and completed a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering as well as a bachelor’s in physics. She then completed her master’s in electrical engineering.
After completing her studies, Koch joined NASA as an electrical engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. While at Goddard, Koch worked in the
Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics on instruments for several space science missions. After her time at Goddard, Koch worked in Antarctica at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and Palmer Station. From there she returned to her electrical engineering roots and worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, contributing to instruments on the Juno spacecraft and Van Allen probes.
In 2013 Koch was selected as a member of NASA’s 21st astronaut group. After six years of intense training, she launched on her first space mission to the ISS on 14 March 2019 from Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Soyuz spacecraft. She was joined by astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin. In her tenure on the ISS, Koch served as a flight engineer on expeditions 59, 60 and 61. While aboard the ISS, Koch worked on several scientific studies that covered human biology, Earth science, technology development and more. She also completed three all-woman spacewalks out of her six total spacewalks, spending a total of 42 hours and 15 minutes in the vacuum of space.
18 October 2019 wasn’t originally supposed to be a historic day. The first all-woman spacewalk was meant to occur on 29 March, but an issue with spacesuit sizes delayed that plan. The most important part of the spacesuit is a hard plastic torso piece that holds the electronics that control all the suit’s systems. An ill-fitted spacesuit can lead to serious safety issues, and reconfiguring the suit can take up to 12 hours. Koch and her colleague Anne McClain were scheduled to participate in a spacewalk together, but there was only one spacesuit made to fit McClain or Koch, so McClain swapped places with Nick Hauge so that Koch could wear the one spacesuit that fit. By October, the crew had reconfigured another suit to fit Jessica Meir, who joined Koch on the first all-woman spacewalk. For more than seven hours, the pair worked on replacing a battery unit that failed to activate after new lithium-ion batteries were installed. Koch returned to Earth on 6 February 2020 after spending 328 days in space, setting the record for the longest space mission by a woman.
Space travel has traditionally been designed for men. The physical embodiment of that fact is NASA’s spacesuits, which had been designed with a man’s physique in mind. Koch’s participation in the first all-woman spacewalk was a groundbreaking accomplishment for female astronauts and all non-male people around the world. In December 2020, Koch was selected as one of the astronauts who will journey to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program. This means she could be one of the first – if not the first – woman to step foot on the Moon.