[NASA HQ News] NASA Astronaut Tim Kopra Available for Interviews Before Space Station Mission

November 17, 2015  MEDIA ADVISORY M15-163 NASA Astronaut Tim Kopra Available for Interviews Before Space Station Mission   Attired in the training versions of his Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra trains in the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory near NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credits: NASA NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, who is making final preparations for a December launch to the International Space Station, is available for live satellite interviews from 7-8 a.m. EST Tuesday, Nov. 24. Kopra will participate in the interviews live from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. The interviews will be preceded at 6:30 a.m. by a video highlighting his mission training. To participate, reporters should contact Karen Svetaka at 281-483-8684 no later than 3 p.m. Monday, Nov. 23. Media participating in the live shots must tune to NTV-3. Satellite tuning information is available at: http://go.nasa.gov/1pOWUhR Kopra, who was born in Austin, Texas, will launch to the station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft at 6:03 a.m. EST on Dec. 15 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, along with crewmates cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Tim Peake of ESA (European Space Agency). Kopra's first mission to space was as a flight engineer on Expedition 20 in 2009. During that two-month mission, he completed one spacewalk that lasted five hours, 32 minutes. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York. He holds a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, a second master's degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a third and fourth in business administration from Columbia University in New York and London Business School in the United Kingdom. At the space station, Kopra, Malenchenko and Peake will join Expedition 46 NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov. Kelly and Kornienko are approaching the ninth month of their one-year mission on board the space station. Together, the six crew members will continue the several hundred experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science currently underway and scheduled to take place aboard humanity's only orbiting laboratory. Kopra is scheduled to return to Earth with crew members Malenchenko and Peake in June. For more information on NASA TV coverage, see: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv Kopra's biography is available at: http://go.usa.gov/c2WVY Follow Kopra on Twitter: http://twitter.com/astro_tim Follow Expedition 46 and 47 crew members on Instagram: http://instagram.com/iss For information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station -end- NASA news releases and other information are available automatically by sending an e-mail message with the subject line subscribe to hqnews-request@newsletters.nasa.gov. To unsubscribe from the list, send an e-mail message with the subject line unsubscribe to hqnews-request@newsletters.nasa.gov.