Mike Massimino

Mike Massimino grew up in Franklin Square, New York, dreaming of becoming an astronaut after watching the Apollo Moon landings as a boy. That dream took persistence: NASA rejected his astronaut application three times and medically disqualified him before he was finally selected in 1996. His story is a case study in resilience, reinvention, and refusing to give up on a goal that once seemed impossible.

Over the course of his NASA career, Massimino flew on two Space Shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope—STS-109 aboard Columbia in 2002 and STS-125 aboard Atlantisin 2009. Across those flights he logged more than 571 hours in space and over 30 hours across four spacewalks, including a dramatic, improvised repair of an instrument never designed to be fixed in orbit—widely regarded as one of the most intricate tasks ever performed during a spacewalk.

In 2009 he became the first person to send a message from space via social media, opening a new era of public connection to human spaceflight. Since retiring from NASA, Massimino has served as a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and as senior advisor for space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.

He is the author of the New York Times best-seller Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe and its follow-up, Moonshot: A NASA Astronaut’s Guide to Achieving the Impossible. A familiar face on television, he has a recurring role as himself on The Big Bang Theory and appears frequently as an expert commentator on space exploration.