Watching the Columbia space shuttle launch in 1982, a young Kjell Lindgren set his sights on becoming an astronaut. His appetite grew until, in 2015, he found himself tending to one of the first plants grown off-Earth on the International Space Station (ISS). The taste of that first space adventure – and the red romaine lettuce – was beyond anything he’d dreamed.
Now he’s going back.
Lindgren (MD, ’02) is the University of Colorado system’s 18th astronaut and the first to have graduated from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is the commander of the SpaceX Crew-4, scheduled to launch for a six-month mission to the ISS no earlier than April 23.
NASA's SpaceX Crew-4 astronauts participate in a training session at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. From left to right: Jessica Watkins, Robert "Bob" Hines, Kjell Lindgren and Samantha Cristoforetti.
Instead of launching from Kazakhstan as he did in 2015, this time his crew will depart from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The four-member crew will join three Russian cosmonauts at the ISS, where they will be part of over 100 experiments, including everything from growing plants to studying neuro-vestibular dysfunction.
“We study the changes that we see in the human body in weightlessness and try to tease out what’s normal and what’s abnormal and how we can apply that knowledge to some of the clinical issues that we see on the ground,” Lindgren said.
Lindgren said CU “played a tremendous role” in helping him achieve his goals of becoming a physician-astronaut. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. Now Lindgren has advanced into the commander ranks for ISS missions, and in 2020, he was chosen as one of the 18 astronauts eligible for Artemis missions on and around the moon.
The proud CU alumnus took a few minutes out of his busy schedule at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston to chat with CU Anschutz Today about his career journey and the upcoming ISS mission.
Photo at top: NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren takes images of the Earth on board the International Space Station on Dec. 1, 2015, from the Cupola, the 360 degree viewing and robotic Canadarm 2 control area.