Army Col. Timothy Creamer, JAXA's Soichi Noguchi Named To November 2009 Mission

NASA and its international partners have assigned two crew members to the Expedition 20 International Space Station mission.

NASA astronaut Timothy J. Creamer, a colonel in the US Army, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi will launch on a Soyuz spacecraft in November 2009. Creamer will be making his first trip to space.

Creamer and Noguchi will join the Expedition 20 mission in progress and remain aboard the space station for six months as flight engineers. Creamer also will serve as a NASA science officer. Other members of the Expedition 20 crew have yet to be named.

Expedition 20 will continue assembly of the station as well as outfit the orbiting complex with spare parts and supplies.

Creamer was born in Fort Huachuca, AZ but considers Upper Marlboro, MD to be his hometown. He has a bachelor's in chemistry from Loyola College and a master's in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1998.

Noguchi was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan, and considers Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan, his hometown. He has a bachelor's and a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Tokyo. He flew as a mission specialist aboard space shuttle Discovery's return to flight mission in 2005 and performed three spacewalks. He was selected as an astronaut in 1996 by Japan's National Space Development Agency, which now is known as JAXA. He reported to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in August 1996.

Crew members named as backups are NASA astronaut and Army Col. Douglas H. Wheelock, and JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa.

FMI: www.nasa.gov