If you watched news reports of the SpaceX launch Sunday night, you may have seen an Asian astronaut.
He’s Soichi Noguchi who’s made two previous space flights including the STS-114 mission by the space shuttle Discovery in 2005. He’s also flown to the International Space Station in 2010 aboard the Soyuz TMA-17, according to Chron.com.
With Sunday’s launch, Noguchi became just the third person to fly to space aboard three different type of space crafts. The other two are NASA astronauts Wally Schirra and John Young.
“It’s quite an honor to have the same experience like Mr. John Young did,” Noguchi said to SpaceFlightNow. “I still remember my astronaut candidate days, when I came here back in 1996, John Young was still flying T-38s. So I had the privilege to fly with him. So it’s definitely quite an honor.”
The two met during Noguchi’s two years of training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center where he became qualified as a Mission Specialist in 1998.
Noguchi is from Japan and is flying under an agreement between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
According to MyNews13, Noguchi is known for his sense of humor and even rolled the first sushi in space at the International Space Station a decade ago.
“Camaraderie is very important, actually (Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and I) had the luxury to spend one week in the wilderness for survival training,” he said. ‘So we know each other pretty well in the wilderness and camping. And that plays huge dividends so that we know how each other behaves under stressful condition.
Noguchi admits he’ll miss his wife and three children very much, but promised them he’ll return with a fun story.
SpaceX is owned by Tesla’s Elon Musk. This is NASA’s first mission sending a crew of astronauts into space on a privately-owned spacecraft. Reuters reports the four astronauts are dubbed Resilience. They lifted off aboard the Crew Dragon capsule from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, FL Sunday night at 7:27 pm ET.
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