NC astronaut to leave Earth for International Space Station Thursday

Christina Hammock Koch is set to launch to the International Space Station on Thursday for her NASA assignment to Expedition 59/60.

It will be her first trip to space.

She will be joined by NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin.

Their spacecraft is scheduled to launch at 3:14 p.m. from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The journey to the International Space Station will take six hours, NASA said.

Koch was born in Michigan but calls Jacksonville, North Carolina, home. She graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Math in 1997 and went on to North Carolina State University to earn a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, a bachelor of science in physics and a master of science.

She began her NASA career as an electrical engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics.

She has contributed to instruments studying radiation particles for NASA missions, including Juno and the Van Allen Probes.

Koch is used to working in extremes. Working as a research associate in the U.S. Antarctic Program over the winter, she also served on the firefighting teams and ocean/glacier search and rescue teams. News of her selection to the astronaut program came as she was studying ozone for NOAA in American Samoa.

Hague and Ovchinin were aboard a launch to the International Space Station in October 2018, which failed and ended in a ballistic landing.

On March 29, Koch will participate in the first all-female spacewalk.