NASA announced on the 29th that Korean American astronaut Jonny Kim (40) will be carrying out his first mission on the International Space Station (ISS) next year.

According to NASA’s website, Jonny Kim will board the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft in March 2024, alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), heading to the ISS.

The crew will stay on the ISS for about eight months, during which they will conduct scientific research and experiments.

Jonny Kim, a Korean American from an immigrant family that settled in California, is a physician-turned-astronaut with a Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School.

He previously worked as an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Before that, he served in the U.S. Navy SEALs, where he completed over 100 combat missions. In 2017, Jonny Kim was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA and underwent about two years of training before being chosen as one of the astronauts for NASA’s Artemis project, which aims to explore the Moon and Mars.

The selection process for the Artemis project was highly competitive, with over 18,000 applicants. Jonny Kim was one of 11 candidates who were ultimately selected, making it through a competition with odds of approximately 1,600 to 1.