Lieutenant Colonel Mark Vande Hei
U.S. Army astronaut candidate Lt. Col. Mark Vande Hei credits the Army for the education and skills he needed to become an astronaut candidate.
The 42-year-old from Minneapolis, Minn., attended Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., with a scholarship through the Army Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) and graduated in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in physics.
After graduation, Vande Hei joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 325th Infantry in Vicenza, Italy. He then headed to Fort Carson, Colo., where he worked with a mechanized engineering battalion.
Vande Hei decided to continue his education, and the Army paid for him to attend graduate school at Stanford University; where in 1999, he received his master’s degree in applied physics. For the next three years, he taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point as an assistant professor in the physics department.
Vande Hei’s Army company commander was the first to suggest that Vande Hei apply to become an astronaut based on his education and background, and he eventually became a space operations officer. While stationed with the space battalion at Peterson Air Force base in Colorado, Vande Hei volunteered for deployment to Iraq where he served from 2004-2005.
When he returned to the United States, Vande Hei was assigned to the Army detachment at NASA in Houston where he began working in mission control as a capsule communicator, the primary communicator between the ground support team and the astronauts in orbit.
In June 2009, Vande Hei was selected to the 2009 NASA astronaut candidate class and will begin training for future space missions.
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