As the first person to tweet from space, former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino is well-known around the world thanks to appearances on televisions shows including the mega-hit CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, The Planets for Science Channel, National Geographic Television’s One Strange Rock and talk shows including the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and The Late Show with David Letterman.
A veteran of two flights to space, he is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe and has won several accolades and awards including the Star of the Italian Solidarity (Italian Knighthood), two NASA Space Flight Medals, American Astronautical Society’s 2009 Flight Achievement Award, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and a 2017 Christopher Award.
Massimino was chosen by NASA as an astronaut candidate in 1996 following an impressive engineering career at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, IBM and NASA. He spent 571 hours and 47 minutes in space in total, and flew twice as an astronaut, firstly in 2002 on the STS-109 Columbia and on the final Hubble servicing mission, STS-125 Atlantis in 2009. Massimino sent the first ever tweet from space, and was part of the team who achieved the most hours of spacewalking in a single space shuttle mission.
In 2014 Massimino left NASA to begin teaching at Columbia University, New York, where he teaches Introduction to Human Space Flight, an undergraduate engineering course. Frequently appearing in the media, he showed up six times playing himself on The Big Bang Theory, and has hosted Science’s The Planets and Science Channel’s live coverage of the 2017 total solar eclipse.
