Gregory Chamitoff

Origins and early life

Gregory Chamitoff was born in Montreal into a Jewish family, and the family is documented: his aunt Mona Shlafman runs the Fairmount Bagel bakery, and before he lifted off his cousin Rhonda and her daughter gave him two Jewish prayers to take with him, while two rocket-shaped mezuzot made by the Tel Aviv silversmith Laura Cowan went up in his personal kit.

Work and career

That is the stated route by which he is here, reported by the Canadian Jewish News on 11 June 2008. He was six years old, watching Apollo 11, when he decided what he wanted to do. Degrees followed at Cal Poly, Caltech and a doctorate at MIT in 1992, on robust control of hypersonic vehicles; he taught in Sydney, joined NASA's mission operations in 1995 and was selected as an astronaut in 1998. He spent nine days on the sea floor for NEEMO 3, then six months aboard the International Space Station across Expeditions 17 and 18 in 2008, launching on STS-124 on 31 May.

He took eighteen sesame bagels from his family's bakery with him — the first bagels in space — played a long, increasingly competitive chess match against mission control, and voted in the American election from orbit. In 2011 he flew STS-134, the last flight of Endeavour, which delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. He founded Zero Robotics, in which schoolchildren program satellites aboard the station.