What Would You Ask NASA Astronaut Chris Cassidy?

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expedition 35 crew, training
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, Expedition 35/36 flight engineer, attired in a training version of his Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit, is submerged in the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) near NASA's Johnson Space Center. (Image credit: NASA)

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy is counting the days before he launches to the International Space Station this month. But before he leaves Earth, Cassidy will touch base with SPACE.com and we want to know what you would ask the American spaceman if you could.

SPACE.com's Clara Moskowitz will speak to Cassidy live on Friday (March 8) between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. EST (1100 and 1200 GMT) in a NASA interview that will be broadcast live on NASA TV. And that is where you come in. What questions do you have for Cassidy, who is making his first long-duration spaceflight this month?

You can watch the interview live SPACE.com here via NASA's webcast feed.

At the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Expedition 35/36 Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy (right), Soyuz Commander Pavel Vinogradov (center) and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin clasp hands for photographers prior to the start of qualification simulation runs in a Soyuz spacecraft mock-up on March 5, 2013. The three crew members are training for launch March 29, Kazakh time, to the International Space Station in their Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (Image credit: NASA)

Cassidy will launch to the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 28 at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT), though it will be early March 29 at the launch site in Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The NASA astronaut will launch alongside two Russian cosmonauts, veteran spaceflyer Pavel Vinogradov and first-time flyer Alexander Misurkin.

It will be the first-ever same day flight to the space station by an astronaut crew.

Chris Cassidy is a veteran NASA astronaut who first launched into space in 2009 during NASA's STS-127 mission on the space shuttle Endeavour, which visited the International Space Station. He performed three spacewalks to upgrade the space station with the addition of a porch-like experiment platform and an experiment module for Japan's Kibo laboratory module on the outpost.

Cassidy, 43, hails from York, Maine, and has three children with his wife Julie. He is a commander in the U.S. Navy and served as a Navy SEAL for 10 years before joining NASA's astronaut corps in 2004.

The three men will join three other members of their Expedition 35 crew (already aboard the station) when they arrive on March 28. Cassidy, Vinogradov and Misurkin will also form the core of Expedition 36, which will begin when the station's three outgoing crewmembers return to Earth later this month.  Vinogradov will command the Expedition 36 portion of the mission.

So, what questions do you have for Chris Cassidy? Let us know in the comments below!

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Tariq Malik
Tariq Malik
Editor-in-Chief

Tariq is the Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001, first as an intern and staff writer, and later as an editor. He covers human spaceflight, exploration and space science, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Managing Editor in 2009 and Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. In October 2022, Tariq received the Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting from the National Space Club Florida Committee. He is also an Eagle Scout (yes, he has the Space Exploration merit badge) and went to Space Camp four times as a kid and a fifth time as an adult. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast with space historian Rod Pyle on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.