Navy SEAL, Harvard Medical School-trained physician, and astronaut Jonny Kim is scheduled to serve as a flight engineer aboard an upcoming space mission next year, NASA recently announced.
Lt. Cmdr. Kim is expected to be launched into space in March 2025 along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft. The three men plan to spend about eight months at the International Space Station.
As part of his space mission, Kim will conduct scientific investigations and other tasks to help prepare the space station’s crew for future missions.
To say that Kim’s resume is impressive would be a vast understatement. He served as an enlisted Navy SEAL and was later commissioned as an officer. He is also a dual-designated naval aviator and flight surgeon. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of San Diego and went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School and intern with Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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Kim was selected to serve as an astronaut in 2017 and then completed his advanced helicopter training in 2023.
“Space flight is closely related to aviation, and proper crew resource management allocates human resources to accomplish the mission safely and effectively,” Kim said in a March 2023 Navy news release. “By virtue of the helicopter cockpit environment, helicopter pilots bring an abundance of CRM to the spaceflight table.”
As a Navy SEAL, Kim completed more than 100 combat missions, according to his NASA biography. He was awarded the Silver Star for braving intense enemy fire to rescue two wounded Iraqi soldiers from a kill zone while he was deployed to Ramadi in 2006. His other military awards include the Bronze Star Medal with “V” device for valor, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Combat “V”, Combat Action Ribbon and various campaign and service awards.
In 2020, Kim spoke with Task & Purpose about his career. He said he did not plan to join the military while growing up, but when he was 16 a friend in his martial arts class told him about the SEALs, and he felt inspired to join the ranks of special operators, who go through the most difficult military training and carry out missions that no one else can do.
“The most important part of it was that they never sought recognition or advertised the nature of their work,” Kim said. “And it was so profound, that level of humility, and professionalism, that I knew that that’s what I wanted to do.”
Kim went on to deploy as a Navy SEAL combat medic to Ramadi and Sadr City, Iraq, both of which were among the most dangerous places in the country at the time. He said he decided to go to medical school afterward because he was inspired by the doctors he worked with.
“I made promises to a lot of the people that I lost, that I would spend the rest of my life doing something good, something positive for the world, because they left a void when they died, and I know that they would have been successful, making the world a better place had they lived,” Kim said. “Those are big shoes for me to fill. At that point in time, I felt medicine was a good platform to spread that goodness, to leave that positive contribution.”
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