Epps will join veteran astronaut Andrew Feustel as a flight engineer.
NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps will become the first African American crew member on the International Space Station when she flies to space in May 2018, the space agency announced Wednesday.
Epps will join veteran astronaut Andrew Feustel as a flight engineer on Expedition 56, and remain on board for Expedition 57.
“Each space station crew brings something different to the table, and Drew and Jeanette both have a lot to offer,” said Chris Cassidy, chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “The space station will benefit from having them on board.”
Jeanette Epps, a native of New York, spent seven years as a CIA technical intelligence officer before being selected as a member of the 2009 astronaut class.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1992 at LeMoyne College in her hometown of Syracuse and went on to complete a master’s of science in 1994. Epps earned a doctorate in 2000 in aerospace engineering from University of Maryland.
While earning her doctorate, Epps was a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Project fellow, authoring several journal and conference articles on her research.
“It was about 1980, I was nine years old. My brother came home and he looked at my grades and my twin sisters’ grades and he said, ‘You know, you guys can probably become aerospace engineers or even astronauts,” Epps said in a NASA video interview.
“And this was at the time that Sally Ride (the first American woman to fly in space) and a group of women were selected to become astronauts – the first time in history. So, he made that comment and I said, ‘Wow that would be so cool.’”
Even though, other African American astronauts have flown to the Space Station for brief stays during the outpost’s construction, Epps will be the first African –American crew member to live and work on the station for an extended period of time.