NASA astronaut Steve Swanson, who is making final preparations for a March launch to the International Space Station, is available for live satellite interviews from 8-9 a.m. EST Friday, March 7.
Swanson, who hails from Steamboat Springs, Colo., will participate in the interviews live from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. The interviews will be preceded at 7:30 a.m. by a video highlighting of his mission training and previous spaceflight highlights.
To participate, reporters should contact Karen Svetaka at 281-483-8684 or Seth Marcantel at 281-792-7515 no later than 3 p.m., Thursday, March 6.
Swanson holds degrees from the University of Colorado, Florida Atlantic University and Texas A&M University. He worked as a NASA systems engineer and flight engineer for Shuttle Training Aircraft before his selection in 1998 for the astronaut corps. Since then, he has flown to the space station on two space shuttle missions — STS-117 in 2007 and STS-119 in 2009 — during which he conducted four spacewalks.
His mission team includes cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). The three will launch to the station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft March 25 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
At the space station, they will join Expedition 39 members NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, who launched to the station in November 2013. Together, the six crew members will continue the several hundred experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science currently underway and scheduled to take place aboard mankind’s only orbiting lab.
Swanson will assume command of Expedition 40 in May after Expedition 39 returns home. He is scheduled to return to Earth with crew members Skvortsov and Artemyev in September.
For more information on NASA TV coverage, see:
Swanson’s biography is available at:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/swanson.html
Follow Expedition 39 and 40 crew members on Instagram:
Follow other NASA astronauts via Twitter at:
https://www.nasa.gov/NASA_Astronauts
For information about the International Space Station, visit:
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Joshua Buck
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
jbuck@nasa.gov
Jay Bolden
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
jay.e.bolden@nasa.gov