Christina Koch leaves active astronaut corps for leadership engineering role

Astronaut and engineer Christina Koch is stepping down from active flight duty after being appointed as NASA's acting deputy chief engineer, Space and Yahoo Tech reported. According to NASA News and Mashable India, Koch will take over the leadership position on Sunday, November 1. She succeeds Katherine Van Hooser, who is retiring on Wednesday, October 21, after more than 35 years of service to the space agency. [1][2][3][4]

In her new role, Koch will help lead the engineering community at the agency and support technical operations, NASA News reported. Her transition away from active spaceflight duties follows her participation as a crew member on the Artemis II mission. [1][2][3][4]

Koch was part of the first all female spacewalk during an International Space Station mission in 2019 and 2020, set the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, and became the only woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit during the Artemis II lunar flyby in April 2026, which set the record for human distance from Earth [5]. As FTMQ Space reported earlier, Koch has accumulated a total of 338 days in space across her two missions [6, 7]. [5][6][7]