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Scientist-turned-astronaut Gregory Chamitoff got a serenade of sorts aboard the International Space Station today when Mission Control rang up to sing him a Happy Birthday.
Chamitoff, who turned 46 today, is in the midst of a half-year mission aboard the station as part of its Expedition 17 crew. NASA’s Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston beamed up a birthday video to Chamitoff, complete with bloopers, with biomedical engineer Marcus Higgins - who oversees the station’s biomedical systems - singing the astronaut the traditional birthday song.
“Yay! That’s funny,” Chamitoff said. “Thank you very much, I appreciate it.”
NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff aboard the space station. Credit: NASA
Born in Montreal, Canada, Chamitoff grew up in Southern California and is a planetary geologist and engineer. By chance, he watched the launch of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing mission first hand with his family in July 1969 at age 6, and decided then and there he wanted to be an astronaut.
“I told [my father] then that that’s what I want to do and kind of never gave up on that,” Chamitoff has said in a NASA preflight interview. “I have to admit that I kind of grew up on ‘Star Trek.’”
Chamitoff joined NASA’s Mission Operations group at JSC in 1995 and was selected for the astronaut corps three years later. He is making the first spaceflight of his career with his Expedition 17 mission and launched to the station in June aboard NASA’s space shuttle Discovery. Chamitoff is due to return to Earth, and to his wife Chantal and fraternal twin toddlers Dmitri and Natasha, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in November.
