Capt. Chris Cassidy, a Navy SEAL turned NASA astronaut, has been selected to head up the agency's Astronaut Office, according to a release from the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Texas.
Cassidy, 45, will replace Air Force Col. Robert Behnken at the office that manages resources, operations and safety programs for NASA.
Part of that job includes developing flight crew operation concepts and crew assignments for future missions, the release said.
"The Navy has a long history working with NASA and supporting astronauts — during the earliest U.S. space flights, Frogmen helped return astronauts from a splashdown at sea," said Brian Kelly, NASA's director of flight operations, said in the release.
"Now, we are proud to have a Frogman leading the Astronaut Office," he added. "Chris has served this nation admirably in the most challenging of circumstances and he will be a great leader for the astronaut corps."
Cassidy graduated from the Naval Academy in 1993 with a degree in mathematics, then went on to earn a master's in ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.
He spent the first 10 years of his Navy career traveling the world as a SEAL. In the first of his two Afghanistan deployments, he was on the ground within weeks of 9/11 as U.S. forces supported an uprising against the Taliban regime. He also deployed twice to the Mediterranean region.
His decorations include a Bronze Star with "V" device for heroism while operating in the caves of Zharwar Kili in Khost province.including two deployments to Afghanistan and two to the Mediterranean,
He was selected for the astronaut program in 2004 and made his first space flight on the space shuttle Endeavourcq in July 2009.
In 2013, he spent six months in the International Space Station, where he spoke to Navy Times via satellite.
"If you went to the top of a skyscraper and put your toes over the edge and leaned over, your brain would tell you, 'What are you doing? You're crazy,' " he said of space travel. "That's kind of the sensation that you have on your first spacewalk when you open the hatch. It only takes a couple minutes to realize you're not going to fall."
