Koch << kuk >>, Christina (1979-…), is a United States astronaut. In 2023, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that Koch would serve as a mission specialist on the upcoming Artemis 2 moon mission. Artemis 2 is planned to carry astronauts around the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.
In 2020, Koch set a record for the longest spaceflight in history by a woman—328 days. She arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in March 2019. Later that year, Koch and the American astronaut Jessica Meir conducted the first spacewalk in which all the participants were women. Koch participated in more than 210 experiments, including research on how the human body adjusts to isolation, radiation, weightlessness, and the stress of long-duration spaceflight. She returned to Earth on Feb. 6, 2020.
Christina Marie Hammock was born on Jan. 29, 1979, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina. She attended North Carolina State University. There, she earned a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2001 and a B.S. degree in physics and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2002. She worked as an electrical engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, a space communications and satellite development facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, from 2002 to 2004.
From 2004 to 2005, she maintained scientific equipment at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. She oversaw experiments at Palmer Station on Anvers Island, near the Antarctic Peninsula, from 2006 to 2007. She also worked at stations in Greenland and Alaska.
From 2007 to 2009, she worked at Johns Hopkins University, where she helped develop scientific instruments for NASA probes, including the Juno mission to Jupiter. She served as station chief for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) observatory in American Samoa from 2012 to 2013. In 2013, NASA selected her to be an astronaut. She married Robert Koch in 2015.
