Aviation and the studies of out outer-space have come in leaps and bounds over the last few decades.
Astronauts can now spend up to half a year living in international space stations and many are sent to and from space all the time.
NASA’s most recent recruit has a pretty impressive resume, and he seems to be the perfect candidate to be sent into outer space.
Keep scrolling to find out more…
But because of the developments in astronomy over the last few decades, a lot has been discovered about our solar system and what there is outside of Planet Earth.
Soviet Air Forces pilot Yuri Gargarin was the first human to journey into space after completing one orbit of Earth in his capsule Vostok 1.
But 7 years later, Yuri and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin were piloting a plane when it crashed in bad weather and killed them both – he was only thirty-four-years-old.
Yuri’s legacy still lives on to this day – his ashes were interred into the Kremlin wall that is ritually visited by space flight crews prior to their departure for Baikonur.
Following Yuri’s footsteps, 7 American astronauts completed the Mercury Project in which John Glenn was officially the first American to orbit Earth.
The space station (ISS) is an outer-space office for astronauts all around the world to use for science and research on behalf of NASA.
The space station travels through space at a staggering 17,500 miles per hour at an altitude of about 220 miles, and each mission lasts around 6 months – which is the time an astronaut will spend at a time onboard.
Any time an astronaut gets out of a vehicle while in space, it is called a spacewalk. A spacewalk is also called an EVA, which stands for extravehicular activity.
The first-ever person to go on a spacewalk was Alexei Leonov, who was from Russia. The first spacewalk was on March 18, 1965, and it was 10 minutes long.
Whilst the first American to go on a spacewalk was Ed White. His spacewalk was on June 3, 1965, during the Gemini 4 mission which lasted twenty-three-minutes.
Today, astronauts go on spacewalks outside the International Space Station and now, spacewalks usually last between 5 and 8 hours, depending on the job.
It must take a pretty resilient personality to undergo one of these spacewalks for a living.
And his resume is nothing that we have ever seen before.
He is a thirty-five-year-old American-Korean and he has just been hired as a NASA astronaut.
Kim is a former Navy SEAL as well as being a Harvard medical doctor.
Kim, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children, will make history as the first Korean-American NASA astronaut to embark on assignments to the Space Station, on Artemis missions to the Moon and potentially on the first human exploration mission to Mars.
Kim said as a youngster he felt like “the epitome of that quiet kid who just lacked complete self-confidence,” in a 2018 interview with Annals of Emergency Medicine
“Going into the Navy was the best decision I ever made in my life because it completely transformed that scared boy who didn’t have any dreams to someone who started to believe in himself,” he explained.
He was kept very busy during his time in the Navy…
He was commissioned as an officer through the Navy’s enlisted-to-officer commissioning program after he graduated from the University of San Diego with a math degree in 2012.
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He then served as a Special Operations Combat Medic, sniper, navigator and point man on over 100 combat missions in two deployments to the Middle East including Ramadi and Sadr City Iraq. His military honors include a Silver Star and a Bronze Star.
He specialized in emergency medicine and graduated in 2016.
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Kim said he was inclined to pursue medicine after seeing his friends killed in combat – a moment that changed his career trajectory was feeling helpless in 2006 as he tried to treat a friend who was shot in the face. That friend sadly died from his wounds.
‘I was happy, jubilated, excited… all these emotions,’ Kim said on the moment he found out he was selected by NASA for its next astronaut class.