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Meet the Cohasset native leading NASA’s SpaceX mission to the ISS
Stephen Bowen is the spacecraft commander for the Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station.
Cohasset native Stephen Bowen and his crew launched into the cosmos at 12:34 a.m. Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
The crew, flying a SpaceX spacecraft, is expected to reach the ISS just over a day later at 12:43 a.m. Friday, March 3. During their six months as the commercial crew on the ISS, SpaceX said, they will conduct over 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations.
NASA chose 59-year-old Bowen to lead the mission as a spacecraft commander in December 2021. According to NASA, this is his fourth trip out to the stars after three successful shuttle missions in 2008, 2010, and 2011.
Bowen was born Feb. 13, 1964, in Cohasset, according to his NASA biography. In a NASA-made video about him, he says he was the fifth of six children, and describes his childhood in the South Shore town as “idyllic.”
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Bowen graduated from Cohasset High School in 1982 before earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1986 and a master’s degree in ocean engineering from MIT in 1993.
Before joining NASA, Bowen served as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy for 14 years.
“The ideas interested me — the whole concept of running a nuclear power plant underwater,” he says in the video.
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In July 2000, Bowen became the first submarine officer to be selected by NASA to become an astronaut. He’s since logged a total of 47 days, 10 hours, 4 minutes, and 37 seconds in outer space, including 47 hours and 18 minutes of spacewalking.
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“I never had any grand plans of growing up and becoming an astronaut, but I never did anything to preclude that either, based on how I managed to get here. It was just curiosity and enthusiasm,” he says in the video.
Two of Bowen’s three previous NASA missions were on famous spacecrafts. In 2008, he went out among the planets in the space shuttle Endeavor, and in 2011, he traveled through the cosmos on the space shuttle Discovery on its last mission.
This will be Bowen’s first mission actually operating the ISS. He says in the video that he sees himself as a “rookie when it comes to the International Space Station.”
That said, Bowen is the most experienced astronaut on the mission.
“Hopefully my bit of spaceflight experience that I’ve brought with me can help everybody settle in and step into these operations,” he says in the video.
NASA astronaut and Cohasset native Stephen Bowen is leading a mission to the ISS on a SpaceX spacecraft:
On the Crew-6 mission, Bowen is joined by NASA astronaut and fellow MIT alum Warren “Woody” Hoburg. There are two other crewmembers on the mission — Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi.
“I have the most amazing crew…They all have distinct personalities that add so much to the crew. That ability to function as a group is absolutely amazing,” he says in the video.
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The crew launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and is traveling to the ISS on the SpaceX Dragon — the first private spacecraft to take humans to the ISS.
You can watch the Dragon and its crew dock at the ISS live beginning at 11:30 p.m. Thursday.
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