Caribou native and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir will soon take her second flight to the International Space Station.
Meir will serve as spacecraft commander for the four-person crew aboard NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission, set to launch no earlier than Feb. 15, NASA announced earlier this month.
A first-generation American who was born in Caribou and graduated from Caribou High School in 1995, Meir became a NASA astronaut in 2013. She is the only woman from Maine to have gone to space. She was briefly joined by another Mainer — York’s Chris Cassidy — during Expedition 62 in 2020.
“It was something I thought about doing since I was 5 years old,” Meir said in a 2021 Zoom call with Caribou students after returning from space in 2020. “I said this many times during the mission, but it was even more incredible than I’d ever imagined, which is really saying a lot because I had some pretty big expectations.”
The coming mission is a long-duration science expedition aboard the ISS, expected to last around six months. Meir and her crew — which includes another American and astronauts from France and Russia — will replace the SpaceX Crew-11, which launched on Aug. 1.
They will join the crew of Expedition 74, which launched on Dec. 8, on the space station.
Meir previously spent 205 days aboard the ISS in 2019 and 2020 during Expedition 61 and 62, and served as a flight engineer.
During that stint, Meir was a part of the first three all-woman spacewalks alongside fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch.
Meir earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Brown University in 1999, a master’s degree in space studies from International Space University in France in 2000 and a doctorate in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of San Diego in 2009.
She was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 2023 and the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame a year prior. Meir is also a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Caribou High School, where she remains an inspiration to students there and throughout Northern Maine.
“It makes things more real when people can see someone who came from the same background and place as they did,” Meir said in a 2020 interview with the Bangor Daily News.
The SpaceX Crew-12 mission will launch in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft using the company’s Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
