Jack Hathaway

Navy commander, F/A-18 pilot off the USS Nimitz and the USS Eisenhower, and the kind of astronaut who volunteered for the spacewalk pool early and meant it. Jack Hathaway is a first-time flyer who arrived on the Station with more pre-flight hours in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory than anyone else in his class — calm, methodical, a Sunday-morning-coffee kind of voice on the loop.

Before NASA

Hathaway grew up in the United States and attended the United States Naval Academy, graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering. He was commissioned in the Navy and trained as a naval aviator, qualifying on the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. He flew operational deployments from the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, accumulating hundreds of carrier landings and combat hours.

After his operational tours he attended the Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, and became a test pilot — evaluating new aircraft systems, documenting performance envelopes, and writing the reports that determine whether a new configuration is safe for the fleet. The test-pilot community is small and demanding; it selects for people who can stay analytical when hardware is behaving in unexpected ways. That quality translates directly to spacewalk operations, where you are working in a pressurised suit, in hard vacuum, on hardware that may not be cooperating.

He also pursued graduate studies in flight test, adding academic depth to his hands-on test experience.

Spaceflight career

NASA selected Hathaway in the 2021 astronaut class. During candidate training he gravitated toward EVA operations and spent extensive time in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory — NASA’s massive underwater training facility in Houston, where astronauts practise spacewalks on full-scale submerged mockups of Station hardware. He has logged more pre-flight hours there than any other member of his class, establishing himself as one of the most EVA-ready rookies in the astronaut office.

Expedition 74 is his first spaceflight, launched aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon in December 2025.

This expedition

Hathaway serves as flight engineer. His EVA readiness means he is on the short list for any spacewalks scheduled during this expedition — whether planned maintenance or unscheduled repair. He also supports general Station operations, robotics tasks, and experiment execution across the US segment.

The person

Colleagues describe him as even-tempered, thorough, and genuinely enthusiastic about the mechanical reality of working in space. He is the crew member most likely to be found studying EVA procedures in his off hours, reviewing tool configurations, and rehearsing contingency sequences. His voice on the radio is unhurried and precise — the product of years of naval communications discipline.