Interview: Shannon Walker

As we awaited the launch of STS-134 earlier this year , we interviewed Astronaut Shannon Walker at Kennedy Space Center. Here, she talks about her own career and marriage as well as about NASA’s future.

Shannon Walker was born in 1965, was raised and educated in Texas, and is married to fellow astronaut Andy Thomas. Her whole career has been spent at NASA. What’s fascinating about her is that she spent 161 days on the International Space Station, but she’s never flown on a space shuttle. Instead, she made her journey up and back on Soyuz last year. As she watched the final missions of the three orbiters, she knew that, though she’s an American astronaut, she’d never fly aboard an American spacecraft.

About these ads