John Koenig

Commander John Koenig
Space: 1999 character
Martin Landau as Commander John Koenig
First appearance	Breakaway
Portrayed by	Martin Landau
Date of birth	17 March 1957, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Home planet	Earth
Affiliation	Moonbase Alpha
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Posting	9 September 1999, second tour of duty on Moonbase Alpha
Rank	Base Commander
Section	Command

John Koenig is a fictional character from the television series Space: 1999. He was played by Martin Landau. He is American, apparently in his early forties.

John Koenig is the ninth and last Commander of Moonbase Alpha. Koenig served as Moonbase's Commander in both seasons of the series, and he is a focal point of most of the episodes in both seasons.

He was orphaned in his teens and had no siblings or other close family. He was a child of the Space Age and fascinated by the American Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, and thus set his goal to join NASA and the space programme. He studied astrophysics and engineering at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At university, he met professor of astrophysics Victor Bergman and the two formed a close friendship.

In the astronaut training programme, he was close friends with fellow cadets Sam and Tessa. One of the significant events of his life came when he was assigned to a resupply mission to the Venus space station. Before docking, the space craft received a computer diagnosis that a disease of unknown origin had broken out on the station. Fourteen men were afflicted and three had died. Koenig's commanding officer made the decision to abandon the facility and its personnel as an unknown disease of alien origin could decimate the human race if brought back to Earth. This event seared into Koenig's psyche that a commander often was called upon to make the hard decisions, sacrificing a few in favor of the greater good. This event also carried personal pain as fellow cadets Sam and Tessa, who were to be married soon, had been deployed in a scout craft to rendezvous with the station ahead of the supply ship. They, too, were left to die with the others. Koenig would carry the guilt of this action with him for years until forced to confront it by the psychic-power-amplifying entity in "The Lambda Factor".

Later, Koenig would marry (a woman whom he would later describe as being remarkably like Helena Russell) and subsequently lose his wife in the global war of 1987. (This would conflict with the Series One Writer's Guide, which stated Koenig had married an artist, who gave her scientist husband an appreciation for the creative arts. Their marriage ended in an unhappy divorce five years later as they grew apart.) Devastated by her loss, he would throw himself into his work and become a leading astronaut in the new World Space Commission. There, he would meet fellow astronaut Tony Cellini and they would both be assigned to Alpha's Reconnaissance Section. This tour of duty would be cut short by the Ultra Probe disaster of 1996 when Koenig was reprimanded by Commissioner Dixon for his short-sighted support of Cellini's obvious fantasies and reassigned to a desk job on Earth.