NASA Series Part 1

Astronaut Shane Kimbrough

Welcome to the first episode of our four-part series with NASA, focusing on how they approach human performance for the unique demands of spaceflight. We're starting with an astronaut and in the rest of the series, we'll be talking with the human performance and research teams who support them. Stay tuned!

Colonel (retired) Shane Kimbrough is a 1989 West Point graduate, where he was captain of the baseball team. He was commissioned as an aviation officer and flew Apaches, including in Desert Storm. He got his Masters of Science degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998 and headed back to West Point to teach in the math department. While he was teaching he got selected by NASA to be an astronaut and he entered that program in 2004.

He completed his first spaceflight in 2008 on STS-126, one of the last shuttle missions where they were building the international space station. He spent almost 16 days on the mission to expand the crew living quarters to accommodate a six-member crew on the International Space Station (ISS). He performed two spacewalks during this mission. On his second spaceflight, Kimbrough launched to the ISS on the Russian Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This mission lasted 173 days as part of Expeditions 49 and 50, where he performed four spacewalks and numerous science and maintenance activities. He most recently served as commander of the NASA/SpaceX Crew-2 Dragon spacecraft, which launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Once on the ISS, Kimbrough served as Flight Engineer of Expedition 65/66. He performed three spacewalks during the 199-day mission. Kimbrough now has a total of 388 days in space.

For additional insights into Shane's approach to fitness, you can read his profiles in Men’s Health and Men’s Journal.