Christina Koch is carrying a climbing habit into space again, this time as she serves onboard the Artemis II mission. The 47-year-old astronaut’s path to NASA runs through rock walls, ice routes and rope systems, and she has long said those lessons matter when the work gets dangerous.
Koch first took up climbing in college at North Carolina State University and has been lead climbing for at least a decade. Her NASA profile lists rock and ice climbing among her hobbies, and she goes ice climbing in Hyalite Canyon in Montana, where she once lived. She also backpacked through Wyoming’s Wind River Range. In a NASA video produced in 2019, Koch said spacewalking with tethers is a lot like using technical climbing-rope systems.
The comparison fits the way Koch has described her own career. In her NASA interview, Peggy Whitson asked her, “When you rock climb, have you ever been scared?” Koch said, “I felt like she was seeing right to my soul,” and answered, “Absolutely, I have been scared.” She has said the ability to turn fear into focus helped her excel as both a climber and an astronaut. In 2016, she said lead climbing taught her lessons that transferred directly to her work in space: “You can rely on yourself to get out of situations when they are quite frankly scary, and with enough focus and enough confidence you can actually overcome obstacles.”
That mindset shows up in the details of her training and in how NASA has framed her career. When she was preparing for her 2019 time on the International Space Station, Koch did laps on the indoor wall inside the Carmichael Gym at North Carolina State. In 2015, she wrote on Instagram, “Training comes in many forms. The kind in the mountains is my favorite.” She also said the NASA interview committee wanted to talk to her most about rock climbing, working in Antarctica and the other experiences that led her to the agency.
Koch’s climbing background places her in a very small group of astronauts who also pursue mountaineering. Scott Parazynski is the only human who has been to both space and the highest point on Earth, reaching the top of Everest on May 20, 2009, after five space flights and leaving a small moon rock there. Warren “Woody” Hoburg is another member of that group. Koch has already made history of her own, joining the first three all-female space walks in history and setting the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman at 328 days.
For Koch, the question is not whether climbing helped shape the astronaut she became. She has already answered that. What Artemis II does is place that answer back into the mission itself, with one of NASA’s most experienced fliers now taking the same habits that carried her up walls and into the dark edge of fear and bringing them to another flight beyond Earth.