Peggy Whitson

Early life and background

Whitson grew up on a farm near Beaconsfield, Iowa, with her siblings Kathy, Brian, and Hugh, and parents Keith and Beth, who were farmers. Inspired by the first Moon landing in 1969, she decided to become an astronaut. She graduated from Mount Ayr Community High School in 1978, earned a bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1981, and a doctorate in biochemistry from Rice University in 1986. She married Clarence F. Sams.

Research career

After a post-doctoral fellowship at Rice, Whitson worked at Johnson Space Center as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate. From 1988 to 1989, she supervised the Biochemistry Research Group at KRUG International. She served as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch from 1991 to 1997 and at Rice University from 1997. From 1992 to 1995, she was project scientist for the Shuttle-Mir Program, then deputy division chief for the Medical Sciences division at Johnson Space Center until 1996.

NASA career

Whitson worked as a research biochemist at NASA-JSC from 1989 to 1993 and served as technical monitor of the Biochemistry Research Laboratories from 1991 to 1993. She was payload element developer for the Bone Cell Research Experiment on STS-47 and a member of the US-USSR Joint Working Group in Space Medicine and Biology. She was project scientist for the Shuttle-Mir Program from 1992 to 1995 and deputy division chief of the Medical Sciences Division from 1993 to 1996.

Selected as an astronaut candidate in April 1996, she completed training and served as lead for the Crew Test Support Team in Russia. She commanded the NEEMO 5 mission in 2003, was deputy chief of the Astronaut Office from 2003 to 2005, and chief of the Station Operations Branch in 2005. In October 2009, she became NASA Chief of the Astronaut Office, the first woman and first non-pilot in that role, serving until July 2012.

Spaceflight experience

Whitson launched on Expedition 5 aboard STS-111 on June 5, 2002, docking with the ISS on June 7. During that six-month stay, she installed the Mobile Base System and truss segments, performed a 4-hour 25-minute spacewalk, and activated the Microgravity Sciences Glovebox. She served as the first NASA science officer and conducted 21 investigations, returning on STS-113 on December 7, 2002, after 184 days, 22 hours, and 14 minutes. Her second mission, Expedition 16, launched October 10, 2007, on Soyuz TMA-11.

The return on April 19, 2008, featured a ballistic reentry due to a propulsion module failure, subjecting the crew to about eight times Earth's gravity. She spent 191 days, 19 hours, and 8 minutes on that mission. During Expedition 16, on December 18, 2007, she became the female astronaut with the most cumulative EVA time and most EVAs in NASA history. Her fifth EVA, the 100th in support of ISS assembly, brought her cumulative time to 32 hours, 36 minutes; her sixth EVA raised it to 39 hours, 46 minutes.

Did You Know?

• Whitson's 289-day flight was the longest single space flight by a woman until Christina Koch's 328-day flight.
• At age 57 on her final NASA flight, she was the oldest woman ever in space at that time, a record broken in 2021 by Wally Funk.
• Whitson was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.