Station

Kenneth Dwane "Sox" Bowersox (born November 14, 1956) is a United States Navy officer, and a former NASA astronaut. He is a veteran of five Space Shuttle missions and an extended stay aboard the International Space Station.

Bowersox was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, but considers Bedford, Indiana his home town. As a young boy, his family lived in Oxnard, California for seven years and he attended Rio Real elementary. Bowersox is an Eagle Scout and earned a degree in aerospace engineering from the United States Naval Academy before receiving his commission in 1978. He attended the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and graduated with class 85A. He served as a test pilot on A-7E and F/A-18 aircraft, and was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1987. Bowersox holds the rank of Captain in the United States Navy. Bowersox first flew as a pilot on the Space Shuttle missions STS-50 and STS-61, he commanded missions STS-73, a microgravity research mission and STS-82, a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission. He then launched on STS-113 with Don Pettit and Nikolai Budarin for an extended stay aboard the ISS as the commander of ISS Expedition 6 in 2002 and 2003, returning aboard Soyuz TMA-1 rather than the Space Shuttle as a result of the fleet's grounding following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which occurred during Bowersox's tour aboard the Station.