Timothy Kopra

Personal

Timothy Kopra was born in Austin, Texas. He is married to Dawn Kaye Lehman of Lewisburg, Kentucky, and they have two children, Matthew and Jacqueline. His mother, Martha A. Witthoft Kopra, lives in Austin; his father, Dr. Lennart L. Kopra, died December 8, 1998. Kopra is of Finnish descent on his father's side—his grandfather Antti Kopra was born in Laavola, Valkjärvi, Karelia, and his grandmother Ester Elisabet Saksinen was born in Helsinki; they left Finland in 1914 for the United States.

Kopra's father spoke Finnish, but Tim does not. On his mother's side, he is of German descent, with ancestors Johann Philipp and Anna Catharina Finckel arriving in New York in the 1700s as part of the first group of Palatine Germans who settled in Germantown in the Hudson Valley in 1710. In 1981, Kopra was photographed singing on stage and playing trombone for the Austin punk funk band Big Boys.

Military career

Kopra received his commission as a second lieutenant from the U.S. Military Academy in May 1985 and became an Army aviator in August 1986. He then served a three-year assignment at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as an aeroscout platoon leader, troop executive officer, and squadron adjutant in the 101st Airborne Division's air cavalry squadron.

In 1990, he was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division in Hanau, Germany, and deployed to the Middle East for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He completed his tour as an attack helicopter company commander and an operations officer. Kopra retired from the U.S. Army in November 2010.

NASA career

Kopra was assigned to NASA at the Johnson Space Center in September 1998 as a vehicle integration test engineer, serving as an engineering liaison for Space Shuttle launch operations and International Space Station hardware testing. He was involved in contractor tests of EVA interfaces for each space station truss segment. Selected as a mission specialist by NASA in July 2000, he completed astronaut candidate training and took on technical duties in the Space Station Branch, focusing on crew interfaces for future ISS modules and support computers.

In September 2006, he served as an aquanaut on the NEEMO 11 mission, living and working underwater for seven days. He spent a little less than 60 days as a flight engineer on Expedition 20, arriving on STS-127 and returning on STS-128, and participated in the first spacewalk of the STS-127 mission. He was assigned to STS-133 but lost that assignment after a bicycle accident possibly breaking his hip, replaced by Stephen G. Bowen. He returned to the ISS in December 2015 as part of Expedition 46 and as commander of Expedition 47, launching on Soyuz TMA-19M.

During a spacewalk on January 15, 2016, his spacesuit began leaking water into his helmet, cutting the walk short; the same suit had a more serious water leak during a spacewalk by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano. Kopra returned to Earth on Soyuz TMA-19M on June 18, 2016, after spending 186 days in space.