Former NASA Astronaut & New York Times Best-Selling Author

Mike Massimino

Mike Massimino grew up in Franklin Square, New York, dreaming of becoming an astronaut. NASA rejected his astronaut application three times and medically disqualified him before he was finally selected in 1996. Over the course of his NASA career, Massimino flew on two Space Shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope—STS-109 aboard Columbia in 2002 and STS-125 aboard Atlantisin 2009. He logged more than 571 hours in space and over 30 hours across four spacewalks. In 2009 he became the