THE CHALLENGE
The International Space Station (ISS) enables astronauts to live in relative comfort, housing five different space agencies in a six-bedroom facility with six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym and a bay window that offers an out-of-this-world, 360-degree view.
But the ISS, which housed its first crew in 2000, didn’t start out that way. Hertz Fellow Eric Boe piloted two missions that enabled its expansion.
THE PATH
Boe started his career in the Air Force, where he was a test pilot, instructor and flight commander. When Boe retired from the Air Force, he had logged more than 6,000 flight hours in more than 50 different aircraft.
In 2000, he was selected as an astronaut by NASA, which put him in the pilot’s seat of an entirely new kind of vehicle, with a critical mission behind it.
THE IMPACT
Boe served as pilot for two spaceflights. The first was STS-126 Endeavor in 2008, a mission that expanded the living quarters of the ISS to eventually house six crew members through the delivery of a new bathroom, kitchen, two sleeping quarters, exercise machine and water recycling system.
The second was STS-133 Discovery in 2011, which delivered the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM), which added storage capacity for spare parts, supplies and waste; and the fourth Express Logistics Carrier (ELC), which is a platform designed to support external payloads on the ISS.
Boe isn’t done yet. He’s currently the assistant to the chief for commercial crew in the astronaut office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where he works with NASA’s commercial partners and crews assigned to fly with those companies to develop and test new spacecraft being built to transport astronauts to and from the ISS.
