Georgia Tech engineering graduate and astronaut Shane Kimbrough will serve as a spacecraft commander for a collaborative mission between NASA and SpaceX.

Kimbrough will lead Crew-2, a planned group of four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft flight to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

Crew-2 is currently scheduled to launch in spring 2021, after the completion of NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight mission, which is expected to return to Earth Aug. 2, and the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission, planned for late September of this year.

Crew-2 will remain aboard the space station for six months, joining up with three crewmates who will arrive via a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Kimbrough grew up in the Atlanta metro area and received a master’s degree in operations research in 1998 from Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He was selected to be an astronaut in 2004. This will be his third trip to space.\

Kimbrough is one of 14 Georgia Tech astronaut graduates, which ties the Institute for second most among public universities.

Born in Killeen, Texas, and raised in Atlanta, Kimbrough was selected as an astronaut in 2004. He first launched aboard space shuttle Endeavour for a visit to the station on the STS-126 mission in 2008, then aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for Expedition 49/50 in 2016. He has spent a total of 189 days in space, and performed six spacewalks . He completed his first spaceflight in 2008 on STS-126, where he spent almost 16 days on the mission to expand the crew living quarters to accommodate a six-member crew.  During the mission, he performed two spacewalks.   Before being selected as an astronaut, Kimbrough joined NASA in 2000 as a Flight Simulation Engineer (FSE) on the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA).