NASA announced on October 13, 2026 that astronaut Christina Koch will serve as the agency's acting deputy chief engineer beginning Sunday, November 1. She succeeds Katherine Van Hooser, who retires October 21 after more than 35 years of NASA service.

In the role, Koch will help lead NASA's engineering community, supporting technical oversight, mission readiness, and engineering excellence across the agency's programs and projects.

It is rare for someone still holding flight status to take the agency's top deputy engineering post, and the move carries a real trade-off: the job makes Koch ineligible for any future mission.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the appointment as uniquely suited to her, saying she "has seen NASA engineering from both sides of the equation: developing complex systems on the ground and trusting them with her life in space."

Koch's credentials anchor the announcement.

She served as a mission specialist on Artemis II in April 2026, carrying out the first crewed flight around the Moon in more than 50 years, and previously spent 328 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station — the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman — while participating in the first all-female spacewalks with Jessica Meir.

According to talkoftitusville.com, she and her Artemis II crewmates hold the record for distance traveled away from Earth, making her the highest-flying woman in history.

She began at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as an electrical engineer building scientific instruments, with field engineering experience in Antarctica and the Arctic before her 2013 astronaut selection.

The appointment completes an unusual arc through engineering education.

WRAL reports that Koch is a three-time graduate of North Carolina State University, earning two bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and physics in 2001 and a master's in electrical engineering in 2002, and that in August 2026 the university dedicated its Engineering Building II as Koch Hall in her honor.

WRAL also notes she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on instruments for the Juno spacecraft and the Van Allen Probes.

She takes the post from Van Hooser, whom NASA credits with propulsion leadership that spanned the space shuttle main engine's final 21 flights and the first chief engineer role for the Space Launch System's Liquid Engines Element.

The timing matters.

Isaacman tied the leadership handoff to NASA's near-term agenda — returning Americans to the lunar surface, building a Moon Base, getting underway on nuclear power in space, and developing capabilities for Mars — a slate in which engineering oversight and mission readiness decisions become decisive.

Associate administrator and chief engineer Amit Kshatriya said Van Hooser's guidance steered the agency through critical milestones, and that he is "confident Christina will continue the tradition of technical excellence that is essential to everything we do at NASA."

From November 1, Koch's job shifts from riding the hardware to deciding whether NASA's next generation of hardware is ready to fly.