Don Pettit

Don Pettit is a NASA astronaut with 590 days in space across four missions between 2002 and 2025. He is also a scientist, an inventor, and a photographer known for breathtaking space images of the Earth and sky at night from the International Space Station.

After receiving a chemical engineering Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1983, Pettit became a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory until 1996, when he joined NASA and moved to Houston. In 2002 he served as the science officer for ISS Expedition 6. He used spare parts on the station to invent a photography tracking device that compensates for the orbital movement relative to the Earth’s surface, permitting sharper high-resolution images of city lights at night. In 2008 he was the mission specialist aboard space shuttle Endeavour when he invented the zero-gravity cup, which uses the principle of capillary channel flow to carry fluid along a crease to permit drinking without a straw. It received the first ever patent for an object invented in space.

Most recently, on Expedition 71/72, he spent seven months in orbit, took about a million photos, and researched in-orbit metal 3D printing, water sanitization technologies, plant growth, and fire behavior in microgravity. He returned to Earth on April 19, 2025—his 70th birthday.