The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced Tuesday that astronaut Jeannette Epps will join astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada as a crew member on the first operational flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station.
Epps will be the first Black woman to join an ISS crew. It will also be the first spaceflight for her, NASA said in a news release.
The six-month expedition is planned for a 2021 launch to the station and comes after an Orbital Flight Test-2 without a crew and a crew flight test with astronauts.
Epps, a Syracuse, New York, native, got her bachelor’s degree in physics from LeMoyne College in 1992. Both her 1994 master’s degree in science and 2000 doctorate in aerospace engineering are from the University of Maryland, College Park.
While getting her doctorate, Epps was a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Project fellow, NASA said.
“Jeanette Epps is the natural addition to NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission,” Kathy Lueders, associate administrator for human exploration and operations at NASA headquarters, said in a statement to CNBC. “She fully complements the other members of the first Boeing full duration crewed mission.”
In a video posted on Twitter, Epps said she was “super excited” to join Williams and Cassada, both of whom she’s worked with before, on the mission.
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