Soichi Noguchi
Soichi Noguchi (野口 聡一, Noguchi Sōichi, born 15 April 1965) is a Japanese aeronautical engineer and former JAXA astronaut. His first spaceflight was as a mission specialist aboard STS-114 on 26 July 2005 for NASA's first "return to flight" Space Shuttle mission after the Columbia disaster. He was also in space as part of the Soyuz TMA-17 crew and Expedition 22 to the International Space Station (ISS), returning to Earth on 2 June 2010. He is the sixth Japanese astronaut to fly in space, the fifth to fly on the Space Shuttle, and the first to fly on Crew Dragon.
Soichi Noguchi | |
|---|---|
Noguchi at Ellington Field in 2020 | |
| Born | 15 April 1965 Yokohama, Japan |
| Status | Retired |
| Nationality | Japan |
| Occupation | Engineer |
| Space career | |
| NASDA/JAXA astronaut | |
Time in space | 344 days 9 hours 33 minutes |
| Selection | 1996 NASDA Group |
Total EVAs | 4 |
Total EVA time | 27h 01min |
| Missions | STS-114, Soyuz TMA-17 (Expedition 22/23), SpaceX Crew-1 (Expedition 64/65) |
Mission insignia | |
His third flight was on board the Dragon 2 capsule for the SpaceX Crew-1 mission which launched successfully on 15 November 2020 and landed on 2 May 2021. This makes him the third astronaut to fly on three different launch systems.
He became a part-time lecturer at the graduate school of the University of Tokyo since 2011, a project professor since 2021. As of 2022, he is a project professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Nihon University.
He retired from astronaut duty and quit JAXA on 1 June 2022. He assumed the honorary director of CupNoodles Museum since 7 June 2022, the chief executive fellow of the Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies and the advisor of IHI Corporation since 1 July 2022. He is the representative of MiraiSpace Co., Ltd. (合同会社未来圏).