Mark Polansky
BS aeronautical and astronautical engineering ’78
MS aeronautics and astronautics ’78
Born: 1956
Missions: STS-98, 116, 127
Mark Polansky was the 22nd Boilermaker to join Purdue’s “Cradle of Astronauts” when NASA selected him as one of 10 pilots in its 1996 candidates for the space shuttle program. He went on to log more than 993 hours in space on three spaceflights and became the first person of Korean ancestry to travel into space.
Mark Polansky NASA Bio
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All three of Polansky’s missions helped build and service the International Space Station. Polansky served as pilot of STS-98 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2001. He was mission commander of both STS-116 (Discovery) in 2006 and STS-127 (Endeavour) in 2009.
To pay tribute to his father’s Jewish heritage and raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, Polansky took a teddy bear from the U.S. Holocaust Museum along on the STS-116 mission.
After graduating from Purdue, Polansky received an Air Force commission and served as a pilot and test pilot. He left active duty in 1992 to pursue a career at NASA having flown for more than 5,000 hours.
He held several roles at NASA before and after joining the Astronaut Corps, utilizing his skills as an engineer and pilot to train and educate shuttle astronauts. He retired from NASA in 2012.
