08/29/2026
Some call them “over achievers”…..others just call them “brothers”. What a great success story with a conviction to continue service. While some contemplate why they “can’t” do something…..there are those who just keep on accepting and conquering challenges ahead. Keep your head down and keep pushing forward….the only limitations are self imposed.
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He held a rifle in Iraq, a scalpel in Boston, and a robotic arm 250 miles above Earth. On August 27, 2026, he hung up his spacesuit and went back to the Navy uniform he never really left behind.
Jonny Kim's story doesn't start in a lab or a launch pad. It starts in a high school hallway in Los Angeles in 2002, the year he enlisted straight out of graduation.
He trained as a Navy hospital corpsman first — a medic, not a fighter. Then he pushed through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training and joined SEAL Team 3.
Over more than 100 combat operations in some of the Iraq War's hardest years, Kim rotated through roles most people only see in movies: medic, sniper, navigator, point man. He came home with a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with a Combat "V" for valor.
What do you do after that? Kim went to Harvard Medical School.
He earned a mathematics degree from the University of San Diego first, then his medical degree in 2016, training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He was working as an emergency physician when NASA called.
In 2017, Kim was one of just 12 candidates selected for NASA's astronaut class — a group that nicknamed itself "The Turtles." He spent the next eight years training, working mission control, and waiting for a flight.
On April 8, 2025, it finally happened. Kim launched aboard Russia's Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft, becoming the first Korean-American to fly to space.
He spent 245 days aboard the International Space Station as a flight engineer during Expeditions 72 and 73 — orbiting Earth 3,920 times and covering nearly 104 million miles. Somewhere up there, on Thanksgiving, he ate kimchi and rice his family had sent up from Earth.
During his mission, the station hit a record that hadn't happened in 25 years: every single docking port was occupied at once. Kim also personally commanded the Canadarm2 robotic arm to capture Northrop Grumman's new Cygnus XL spacecraft, guiding 11,000 pounds of supplies safely into place.
In 2023, between astronaut duties, he'd also become a qualified naval aviator, completing advanced helicopter training. He said the hardest part wasn't the flying — it was learning to read a cockpit through night-vision goggles after years of doing the same thing as a SEAL, on the ground, with a rifle instead of a control stick.
His crewmates on that mission were Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky. It was the first spaceflight for both Kim and Zubritsky — while Ryzhikov, a veteran, closed out the mission with 603 total days logged in space over his career.
They landed in Kazakhstan on December 9, 2025. Kim was 41 years old, and he'd just become one of the very few people on Earth who could say they'd been a combat medic, a sniper, a Harvard-trained doctor, and an astronaut — all before turning 42.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman didn't undersell the send-off, calling Kim someone who represents the best of the agency and who kept pushing the edges of exploration while inspiring people well beyond it.
Kim himself put it simpler. Serving NASA, he said, had been the honor of a lifetime — and the biggest lesson of the last decade wasn't about the missions or the hardware. It was that everything comes down to people.
Now, at 42, Kim isn't retiring. He's shifting back into full-time naval aviation training, continuing his career as a Navy Lieutenant Commander — the rank he already held the whole time he was circling the planet.
Medic. Sniper. Doctor. Astronaut. Aviator. Somehow, that's not even the whole list — and whatever Kim does next, it's a safe bet it won't be his last career change.
