About Don

Don's Bio

Don first got interested in becoming an astronaut when he was six years old.  Watching the early astronauts like Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong blasting off into space made him want to follow in their footsteps. And thirty three years later he would do exactly that.

Don started his professional career as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Bell Laboratory’s Engineering Research Center in Princeton, NJ working on materials issues in semiconductor devices.  From there he joined Lockheed Sciences and Engineering in Houston, TX as an engineer working on the Space Shuttle program.

Selected as a mission specialist astronaut in NASA’s 13th group of astronauts in 1990, he is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions, three aboard Columbia and one aboard Discovery.  He has spent 44 days in space completing nearly 700 orbits of the Earth and traveling 17.6 million miles in the process. After retiring from NASA in 2007, Don became the director of the Hackerman Academy of Mathematics and Science at Towson University working to encourage and inspire young Maryland students about the wonders of science and mathematics, to encourage them to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and to energize and prepare teachers in these disciplines. Since 2015, Don has been engaged in public speaking, continuing his efforts to excite and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and astronauts, and encouraging all students to reach for the stars!

Official NASA Biography: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/thomas_donald.pdf