Zena Cardman to Lead SpaceX Crew 11

Astronaut Zena Cardman, keynote for NC Space Grant Symposium in 2021 and NC Space Grant supported scholar, will launch this week as mission commander for SpaceX Crew 11. Liftoff is scheduled for 12:09 p.m. July 31 from Kennedy Space Center.

Before Cardman was selected as an astronaut in 2017, she received multiple NC Space Grant funding awards while a student at the University of North Carolina.

Jobi Cook, NC Space Grant’s associate director, remembers Cardman from those early days. “Zena was the recipient of five NC Space Grant awards that supported her NASA-affiliated research efforts in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, from the Arctic to the Antarctic,” Cook notes. “We are proud to have helped set her career journey.”

Cardman will lead a four person crew to the International Space Station for a long-duration expedition where they will “study plant cell division and microgravity’s effects on bacteria-killing viruses, as well as perform experiments to produce a higher volume of human stem cells and generate on-demand nutrients.”

For details about the mission, see NASA’s discussion of the science.

A livestream of the launch is available on a variety of streaming platforms, including NASA+, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Read more details on NASA’s how to watch page.

You can join an online launch event through NASA by signing up here.

“Trying to explore space generates solutions to problem that we didn’t even know we had”
– Zena Cardman