WEST POINT GRAD KOPRA PREPS FOR SPACE– June 11, 2009

WEST POINT, N.Y. – Colonel Timothy L. Kopra, West Point Class of 1985, is heading to his temporary home on the International Space Station this weekend.

He is scheduled to blast off aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour at 7:17 a.m. Saturday, June 13, from Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

Kopra is scheduled to stay aboard the space station and work as the flight engineer until another shuttle comes to pick him up in August.  He will live with Russian, Canadian and European astronauts and will perform experiments to help scientists determine how humans function and matter behaves in gravity different than Earth’s.  Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who has lived aboard the space station since March, is trading places with Kopra and will return to Earth with the Endeavour crew.

While living in space, Kopra will offer his body to science so researchers can track the effects of little gravity on his cardiovascular and nervous systems and on the systems responsible for balance.  He will contribute blood samples regularly and will have some of his behavior, such as his sleeping patterns, tracked.  The point is to help scientists prepare for humans living on the moon and for long space travel trips to Mars.

Kopra, who is taking his first trip to space, also will assist with experiments on solid and liquid matter.

Before Endeavour returns to Earth, Kopra will help the crew install new space station components and is scheduled to participate in the crew’s first of five spacewalks.

After graduating from West Point, Kopra became an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter pilot and served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.  He earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School.  He then was an experimental test pilot and worked as the test director for the development of the now-defunct Comanche helicopter program.

He was assigned to NASA in 1998 and began work as a vehicle integration test engineer and worked on the space station as it was being designed.  He now gets to see his designs work in space.

Kopra was selected to become an astronaut in 2000 and has been training for space ever since.

Endeavour is scheduled to return to Kennedy Space Center on June 29.

For a full story on Col. Tim Kopra go to the June 11 issue of the Pointer View.

About West Point
West Point, The U.S. Military Academy, is a four-year co-educational federal undergraduate liberal arts college located 50 miles north of New York City. The world's preeminent leader development institution, it was founded in 1802 as America's first college of engineering. Its mission remains constant-to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army. For more information, go to www.westpoint.edu