Don Pettit

Donald Roy Pettit was born in 1955 in Silverton, Oregon, and became one of NASA's most distinctive astronauts by way of the laboratory rather than the cockpit. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Oregon State University and a doctorate in the same field from the University of Arizona, then spent more than a decade as a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory studying reduced-gravity fluid physics, materials processing, and atmospheric science. NASA selected him as an astronaut in 1996. Where many of his peers arrived as test pilots, Pettit came as a working experimentalist, and that instinct — to poke at the physics of everything around him — would define his time in orbit as much as any assigned task.

Pettit has flown four times over more than two decades. His first mission was the long-duration Expedition 6 in 2002-2003, which launched aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-113; during that stay he performed two spacewalks, stepping in on short notice for a crewmate who had been medically stood down. In 2008 he flew the shuttle mission STS-126, operating the robotic arm on a station-outfitting flight. He returned for the long-duration Expedition 30/31 in 2011-2012, where he famously used the station's arm to capture the first commercial cargo craft to reach the ISS, a SpaceX Dragon, in May 2012. His fourth flight, Expedition 71/72, launched on Soyuz MS-26 in September 2024 and lasted about 220 days; he landed on the Kazakh steppe on 19 April 2025 and celebrated his 70th birthday the next day, bringing his career total to roughly 590 days in space across four missions.

Pettit's legacy is unusual for its blend of rigor and delight. He is NASA's oldest active astronaut, and by returning from a seven-month expedition around his 70th birthday he set a new bar for endurance late in a career. He turned the station into a physics classroom for the public through his "Science off the Sphere" demonstrations and became a celebrated orbital photographer, capturing long-exposure star trails and city lights that reached millions. He also became the first person to hold a patent for an invention made in space — the wedge-shaped "zero-gravity coffee cup" that uses capillary action to let astronauts sip rather than slurp their drinks. Honored with NASA's Space Flight, Exceptional Service, and Distinguished Service medals, Pettit remains active in the astronaut corps, still, by his own account, someone who would do the job even if he had to pay for the privilege.