US Space agency NASA and the European Space Agency have selected three astronauts — Indian American Raja Jon Vurputoor Chari, Tom Marshburn and Matthias Maurer — to serve as crew members for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station around September 2021.
Raja Chari will serve as commander of the mission while Tom Marshburn will be the pilot and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer will serve as mission specialist. NASA said a fourth crew member will be added at a later date.
In a statement, NASA announced: ‘This will be the first spaceflight for Chari, who became a NASA astronaut in 2017. He was born in Milwaukee, but considers Cedar Falls, Iowa, his hometown.’
He (Raja Chari) is a colonel in the U.S Air Force and joins the mission with extensive experience as a test pilot. He has accumulated more than 2,500 hours of flight time in his career.
Raja Chari has accumulated flight time in the F-35, F-15, F-16, and F-18 including F-15E combat missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom and deployments in support of the Korean peninsula
Chari graduated in 1999 and majored in Astronautical Engineering and Engineering Science with a Mathematics minor. He was awarded a Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Fellowship and attended graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on automated orbital rendezvous.
To recall, Chari was selected earlier this month as a member of the Artemis Team and is now eligible for assignment to a future lunar mission.
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