Every summer as a kid, Christina Koch begged her parents to send her back to Huntsville, Alabama. Not to the beach, not to her grandfather's farm in Michigan where she spent most of her summers. To Space Camp.

Three or Four Summers, and She Never Wanted to Leave

Koch grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina, but for several summers as a child she flew to Huntsville for Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

Her mother, Barbara Johnsen, later told the Grand Rapids Press that Koch attended for "about three or four years" and "just fell in love with it."

"She would just come home beside herself with excitement and stories to share. She was just always anxious to go back the next summer and really enjoyed it."

Koch was already telling people she wanted to be an astronaut. She kept clippings of space and Antarctica from National Geographic magazines taped to her bedroom wall.

An Idea From a Rocket Scientist, Built Five Years Later

The idea came from rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who proposed it in 1977 after touring the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and noticing a group of students taking notes on what they were learning. Von Braun died later that year. Five years after his death, Ed Buckbee, the center's first director, turned the idea into Space Camp, which opened in 1982.

It puts kids through simulators, mock missions and astronaut training exercises, all while wearing the camp's signature blue flight suit.

The 1986 movie SpaceCamp made the program famous nationwide. Attendance more than doubled almost overnight, jumping from 5,000 to 11,000 campers a year.

Today more than one million people have graduated from Space Camp, arriving from all 50 states and 150 countries.

Seven Kids Who Actually Became Astronauts

Space Camp likes to joke that it turns kids into astronauts. Koch is one of the rare cases where it is literally true.

In 2019, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center counted Koch among just seven Space Camp alumni who went on to become real NASA astronauts.

The Artemis II crew, from left, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman, on the crew access arm at Launch Pad 39B during a September 2023 rehearsal ahead of their Moon flyby mission — The Artemis II crew, Koch second from right, on the launch tower at Kennedy Space Center.

The First Crewed Flight to the Moon Since 1972

On April 1, 2026, Koch launched on NASA's Artemis II alongside astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Five days later, on April 6, 2026, their Orion spacecraft flew around the far side of the Moon, passing roughly 6,400 miles beyond it before turning back toward Earth.

No human had traveled that far from Earth since Apollo 17 in 1972, more than half a century earlier.

Koch became the first woman ever to leave low Earth orbit and travel to the Moon.

The crew splashed down on April 10, 2026, after a nine-day mission. It was the first crewed Artemis flight, a test run for a future Moon landing.

Still the Record Holder

Artemis II was not Koch's first trip to space. In 2019, she spent 328 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station, the longest single spaceflight ever completed by a woman.

During that mission, she and astronaut Jessica Meir carried out the first all-female spacewalk in history, on October 18, 2019.

The Kid in the Flight Suit

Space Camp has sent more than a million kids home with a photo of themselves in that blue flight suit, pretending to fly to space.

One of them actually did.

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