NASA Assigns Astronaut Deniz Burnham to First Space Station Mission

NASA astronaut Deniz Burnham poses for a portrait at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz NASA astronaut Deniz Burnham will embark on her first mission to the International Space Station, serving as an Expedition 76 flight engineer. Burnham will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-30 spacecraft with cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Konstantin Borisov.

Launch is targeted for March 2027, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and the trio will spend about seven months aboard the orbiting laboratory. During her expedition, Burnham will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the Moon and Mars and to benefit people on Earth. Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Burnham graduated with the agency’s 23rd astronaut class in 2024.

Born at Incirlik Air Base in Adana, Turkey, Burnham moved frequently while growing up in a military family. She was living in Wasilla, Alaska, at the time of her selection. A former intern at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Burnham earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

An experienced leader in the energy industry, she spent more than a decade managing onsite drilling operations on oil rigs across North America. S. Navy Reserves as an engineering duty officer.

She is a licensed private pilot with ratings for airplane single engine land and sea, instrument airplane, and rotorcraft-helicopter. For more than 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. The space station helps NASA understand and overcome the challenges of human spaceflight, expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit, and build on the foundation for long-duration missions to the Moon, as part of the Artemis program, and to Mars.