UT Back in Space with Bresnik’s ISS Launch[테네시대학교 녹스빌, 한미교육원]University of Tennessee, Knoxville[외국대학입학]

UT Back in Space with Bresnik’s ISS Launch[테네시대학교 녹스빌, 한미교육원]University of Tennessee, Knoxville[외국대학입학]

Astronaut Randy “Komrade” Bresnik flew to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket today, the latest chapter in UT’s 35-year track record with NASA flight missions.

Bresnik earned his master’s degree in aviation systems from UT Knoxville through the UT Space Institute program in 2002. He is the 10th alumnus to complete a NASA mission in space.

In 1982, Hank Hartsfield (’71) became the first UT graduate in space when he piloted the space shuttle Columbia on its fourth launch, a weeklong mission with former Apollo astronaut Ken Mattingly.

Since then, nine other UT alums—eight from the UT Space Institute and one from UT College of Medicine—have totaled more than a thousand days in space.

In fact, if measured as its own country, UT would have sent more people to space than all but five countries: the United States, Russia, Germany, Japan, and China.

Today’s flight is Bresnik’s second. He flew a mission on the space shuttle Atlantis in 2009 with fellow UTSI alum Barry Wilmore (’94).

A native of Fort Knox, Kentucky, Bresnik was selected as an astronaut in 2004. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps in May 1989. He was a F/A-18 Test Pilot and was deployed to Kuwait to fly combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He has trained as a Cave-a-naut with the European Space Agency to test living deep beneath the Earth’s surface, and as an Aquanaut for NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operation (NEEMO) 19.