Doug Hurley

Douglas G. "Doug" Hurley was born in 1966 in Endicott, New York, and grew up to bridge two distinct eras of American spaceflight. He earned a degree in civil engineering from Tulane University and was commissioned in the U.S. Marine Corps, becoming a fighter and test pilot. Flying the F/A-18 Hornet, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School and became the first Marine to fly the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2000, the same class as Bob Behnken, the man he would later fly alongside on the mission that reopened human launches from the United States.

Hurley flew three times, and each of his flights carried historical weight. His first mission was STS-127 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in July 2009, on which he served as pilot and helped complete assembly of Japan's Kibo laboratory on the International Space Station. He then piloted STS-135 aboard Atlantis in July 2011, the final flight of the entire thirty-year Space Shuttle program, personally closing out one of the defining chapters of American spaceflight. Nine years later, in May 2020, he returned to orbit as spacecraft commander of SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2, the first crewed launch from U.S. soil since the Shuttle's retirement and the first ever aboard a commercially operated spacecraft. He and Behnken launched from the same Kennedy Space Center pad, Launch Complex 39A, that had sent the last Shuttle aloft, and splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico on August 2, 2020.

The symmetry of Hurley's career is striking: he flew the last mission of the Shuttle era and commanded the flight that began the commercial-crew era, making him a living link between how America used to reach orbit and how it does today. Across his three missions he accumulated roughly 2,208 hours in space. A decorated Marine aviator, he and Behnken were awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the nation's highest spaceflight honor, for restoring American human-launch capability aboard Demo-2. He retired from NASA after that mission, having accomplished his stated hope of returning astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil. In retirement he has continued to champion commercial spaceflight and the sustained low-Earth-orbit economy that Demo-2 helped make possible.