Spokesperson Bios

U.S. Army astronaut Col. Tim Kopra credits the Army for giving him the leadership skills and education he needed to become an astronaut and for providing him with the opportunity to go to space for his first time in July 2009 as part of the International Space Station Expedition 20 crew.  While he was in space, Kopra became the first space station crew member to communicate through Twitter.  Kopra sent more than 60 tweets chronicling his daily life on the space station.

The 46-year-old from Austin, Texas, graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a bachelor’s degree in science.  After graduating, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army and was soon after designated an Army aviator in 1986.

For the next three years, Kopra completed an assignment at Fort Campbell, where he served as an aeroscout platoon leader, troop executive officer and squadron adjutant to the 101st Airborne Division’s air cavalry squadron.

In 1990, Kopra was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division in Hanau, Germany, and was deployed to Southwest Asia where he served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.  He completed his tour as an attack helicopter company commander and an operations officer.

After Kopra returned, the Army paid for him to continue his education, and he received his master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995.  Kopra was then selected to attend the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School.  Upon graduation, he was assigned to the U.S. Army Aviation Technical Test Center where he worked as a test pilot on various projects and served as the developmental test director for the Comanche helicopter program.

In 1998, the Army assigned Kopra as a vehicle integration engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.  He served as an engineering liaison for space shuttle launch operations and used the technology skills he learned in the Army to assist with International Space Station hardware testing.  He also was involved in contractor tests of the extravehicular activity interfaces.

Kopra was selected to be an astronaut in 2000, and he began two years of space shuttle, space station and T-38 flight training.  Following that, he served in the Space Station Branch of the Astronaut Office and then completed a Russian language immersion course in Moscow.  In 2005, Kopra began training for a long-duration spaceflight mission, and since then he has completed training at each of the international training sites.

In his recent nearly two-month mission to the space station, Kopra successfully completed his first spacewalk by preparing for the installation of the final component of the Kibo Laboratory, the Japanese experimental module.