K. Megan McArthur

Did You Know?

• In 2022, SpaceX's former support vessel GO Searcher was renamed Megan in her honor.
• She appeared as an animated version of herself in seasons 4 and 7 of Blaze and the Monster Machines.

Oceanography career

At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, McArthur’s graduate work involved studying how sound travels underwater near the shore and processing digital signals. She used a genetic algorithm to analyze transmission loss data and build geoacoustic models for very shallow underwater environments. As chief scientist, she led data collection at sea, planned and directed dives to place instruments on the seafloor and gather sediment samples. She also helped test, deploy, maintain, and recover underwater equipment, and collected marine life and sediment. McArthur volunteered at Birch Aquarium, where she gave public educational demonstrations from inside a large kelp forest exhibit tank.

NASA career

Selected as a mission specialist by NASA in July 2000, McArthur reported for training in August 2000 at the Sonny Carter Training Facility. Following two years of training and evaluation, she was assigned to the Astronaut Office Shuttle Operations Branch working technical issues on shuttle systems in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL). She then served as the crew support astronaut for the Expedition 9 crew during their six-month mission aboard the ISS.

She also worked in the Space Station and Space Shuttle Mission Control Centers as a Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM). In 2006, McArthur was the CAPCOM for STS-116, and she was the EVA capcom for STS-117 in 2007. In 2009, she flew on STS-125 as ascent and entry flight engineer and lead robotics crew member; the mission lasted almost 13 days. In a pre-flight interview, she said: "I'll be the last one with hands on the Hubble Space Telescope."

In 2019, McArthur was appointed Deputy Chief of the Astronaut Office. In July 2020, NASA announced she would fly on SpaceX Crew-2, launching in April 2021 and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico in November 2021. She used the same seat inside Crew Dragon Endeavour that her husband Bob Behnken used on SpaceX Demo-2. She retired from NASA on August 29, 2025.