Michael Foale

Colin Michael Foale CBE
NASA Astronaut
Nationality	British / American
Status	Retired
Born	(1957-01-06) 6 January 1957 (age 60) Louth, Lincolnshire, England
Other occupation	Astrophysicist
Time in space	373d 18h 18m
Selection	1987 NASA Group
Missions	STS-45, STS-56, STS-63, STS-84, Mir NASA-4 (Mir EO-23 and 24), STS-86, STS-103, Soyuz TMA-3 (Expedition 8)
Mission insignia

Colin Michael Foale, CBE (born 6 January 1957) is a British-American astrophysicist and former NASA astronaut. He is a veteran of six Space Shuttle missions and extended missions on both Mir and the International Space Station. He was the first Briton to perform a space walk, and until 17 April 2008, he held the record for most time spent in space by a US citizen: 374 days, 11 hours, 19 minutes. He still holds the cumulative-time-in-space record for a UK citizen.

Foale was born in Louth, Lincolnshire to a British father, Colin, and an American mother, Mary. He was raised in Cambridge and educated at The King's School, Canterbury. A member of the Air Training Corps, he studied at Queens' College, Cambridge, (with Stephen Fry who mocked his ambition of going to space) receiving a first-class honours degree in natural sciences in 1978 and a doctorate in laboratory astrophysics in 1982. When he left university he "owned two pairs of jeans, a donkey jacket, a bicycle and a pilot's licence; which shows I had my priorities absolutely right."

While a postgraduate student at Cambridge University, Foale participated in the organisation and execution of scientific scuba diving projects. Pursuing a career in the US Space Program, Foale moved to Houston, Texas, to work on Space Shuttle navigation problems for McDonnell Douglas. In June 1983, Foale joined NASA Johnson Space Center in the payload operations area of the Mission Operations Directorate. In his capacity as payload officer in the Mission Control Center, he was responsible for payload operations on Space Shuttle missions STS-51G, 51-I, 61-B and 61-C.