Dr. John Grunsfeld is currently the President & CEO of Endless Frontier Associates. He is a former NASA Astronaut with five space shuttle missions to his credit, including multiple spacewalks, masterful surgeries and upgrades on the Hubble Space Telescope. His spaceflights include Space Shuttles Endeavour in 1995, Atlantis in 1997, Discovery in 1999, Columbia in 2002, and Atlantis in 2009. He was the chief scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. from 2003-2004. His last visit to Hubble was in 2009, after which he became the Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where he managed the science program for Hubble and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. He returned to NASA Headquarters as the Associate Administrator of NASAs Science Mission Directorate from 2012-2016. Today John is an Emeritus Scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, working on Hubble observations of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and collaborating on the design of the next generation of space-serviceable telescopes.
Dr. Grunsfeld holds a B.A. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago, postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, and a position as Senior Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He was selected as an astronaut in 1992 and first went to space in 1995. He was inducted into the astronaut hall of fame in 2015. From his NASA profile: “His quest to become an astronaut started at 6 years old. As a child, he toted a lunch box decorated with a NASA Gemini theme, celebrating an early human spaceflight program. His mother was happy to encourage him, he noted at an awards ceremony. ‘She thought it would help my interest in science and math and she said there’s no chance I’d ever actually become an astronaut, so she didn’t have to worry.’ ”