Jessica Meir

• 1. Introduction

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  Jessica Ulrika Meir grew up watching Space Shuttle missions on television in rural Maine, where, as she put it, the stars shone so brightly they felt almost within reach. She knew no one who worked for NASA. She had no inside track. What she had was a father born in Baghdad in 1925 who drove ambulances during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, a Swedish mother who passed on a love of nature, and a curiosity about living things that would carry her to the bottom of the ocean, the top of the world, and eventually into orbit.

  By the time Meir arrived on the International Space Station in the autumn of 2019, she had already spent years beneath Antarctic ice studying emperor penguins, raised bar-headed geese on a Canadian campus to understand how they survive migration across the Himalayas, and logged time underwater in an aquatic laboratory off the coast of Florida. The questions the documentary will answer are not simply about an astronaut's career. They are about what kind of life prepares a person to do all of these things at once.

• 2. A Family of Wanderers

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  Josef Haim Meir was born in Baghdad, Mandatory Iraq, in 1925. He was studying medicine at the American University of Beirut when the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out, at which point he moved to Israel and drove an ambulance before completing his medical degree at the University of Geneva. He eventually settled in Sweden to practice medicine, where he met Ulla Britt Karlsson, a nurse from Vaesteras who had grown up as a Christian. The couple later relocated to the United States so Josef could take up a residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

  A job offer brought them further north to Caribou, Maine, where Jessica was born on the 1st of July, 1977. Her mother never converted to Judaism, but Jessica grew up identifying as culturally Jewish, attending synagogue and celebrating a bat mitzvah. She credits her father's predilection for wandering and her mother's love of nature as twin forces that shaped the direction her life would take.

  At thirteen, Meir attended a youth space camp at Purdue University, an early signal of where her instincts were pulling her. She studied biology at Brown University, spent a semester at Stockholm University in Sweden, and in her senior year ran a student experiment aboard a NASA reduced gravity aircraft, the kind informally known as a vomit comet. She graduated from Brown magna cum laude in 1999 with a Bachelor of Science in biology, then earned a Master of Space Studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, in 2000.

• 3. Life at the Extremes

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  Penguin Ranch on McMurdo Sound in Antarctica is one of the more unusual field sites in all of comparative biology. Meir worked there as part of her doctoral research, scuba diving beneath the ice alongside emperor penguins to study how they manage such extraordinary dives. She was also tracking northern elephant seals in the Pacific Ocean off Northern California, animals capable of similarly remarkable breath-holds.

  Her doctorate came in 2009 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, awarded for that research into diving physiology. The work did not stop at the water's edge. For her postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia, Meir raised bar-headed geese from the beginning so that their physiological responses to high altitude and low oxygen could be measured under controlled conditions. The geese migrate over the Himalayas, one of the most oxygen-deprived routes any bird undertakes.

  In September 2002, years before the doctorate was finished, Meir had also served as an aquanaut on the NEEMO 4 expedition, a joint NASA-NOAA mission held in Aquarius, an undersea research laboratory anchored four miles off the coast of Key Largo. She and her crewmates spent five days saturation diving from that habitat as a space analogue. The mission was shortened due to Hurricane Isadore, then threatened again when Tropical Storm Lili approached, though Lili weakened in time and the crew completed the full five days. That experience of working and training under extreme environmental conditions, surrounded by water and cut off from normal life above, would prove useful preparation for what came later. Her assistant professorship of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, which began for the 2012 academic year, ended with a leave of absence to enter the astronaut corps.

• 4. The Road to Astronaut Group 21

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  From 2000 to 2003, Meir worked for Lockheed Martin Space Operations as an experiment support scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. Her job was to coordinate human space life science experiments conducted by astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle and the ISS, covering physiological topics such as bone loss, muscle atrophy, and lung function. She developed the procedures astronauts used on orbit, trained crew members, and provided ground support from Mission Control while experiments ran.

  In 2009, Meir applied to NASA and reached the semifinalist stage for Astronaut Group 20 without being selected. She applied again, and in June 2013 was chosen as one of eight candidates for Astronaut Group 21. Training concluded in July 2015.

  In 2016, she participated in the ESA CAVES mission alongside Ricky Arnold, Sergei Korsakov, Aki Hoshide, Ye Guangfu, and Pedro Duque, a training course in which international astronauts work in a cave environment designed to replicate the isolation and problem-solving demands of spaceflight. During her time in the astronaut office she also served as capsule communicator, including as lead capsule communicator for Expedition 47, the BEAM mission, and a Japanese Space Agency cargo vehicle mission. The capsule communicator is the single voice on the ground that speaks directly to crew members in space.

• 5. Expedition 61: The All-Female Spacewalk

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  The Soyuz MS-15 launch on the 25th of September, 2019, was the final flight of the Soyuz-FG rocket and the final launch from the Gagarin's Start launch pad, both of which were retired after that mission. Meir, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, and MBRSC astronaut Hazza Al Mansouri reached orbit and docked to the ISS six hours later. Al Mansouri became the first person from the United Arab Emirates to fly in space; his stay on the station lasted eight days before he returned with the Soyuz MS-12 crew.

  Meir had been scheduled to perform three spacewalks to install new lithium-ion batteries on the Port-6 truss structure of the station. Those plans changed when a Battery Charging Discharging Unit failed unexpectedly, preventing the station's newly installed batteries from providing additional power. The fix required an unplanned spacewalk.

  On the 18th of October, 2019, Meir and Christina Koch went outside together to replace the faulty unit. The spacewalk lasted seven hours and 17 minutes. It was the first in history performed entirely by women. During the outing, then-US president Donald Trump called the station to acknowledge the occasion, mistakenly announcing it as the first time a woman had been outside the ISS. Meir corrected him. Koch would return to Earth on the 6th of February, 2020, while Meir continued on into Expedition 62.

• 6. Expedition 62 and Returning Home

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  Delays in NASA's Commercial Crew Program left Meir, Skripochka, and Andrew Morgan as a crew of three for much of Expedition 62. The three-person arrangement is unusual; a fully staffed ISS typically runs with six. On the 9th of April, 2020, three additional crew members arrived aboard Soyuz MS-16: Russian cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, and NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy.

  Cassidy, like Meir, is from Maine. On the 13th of April, the two of them, joined by Morgan, held a live conference with students from around that state. The three also appeared on Some Good News, an internet show hosted by actor John Krasinski, which had launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. The expanded crew conducted experiments on muscle response to long-duration spaceflight as part of the Myotones study.

  Meir, Skripochka, and Morgan departed the ISS on the 17th of April, 2020, landing near the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 11:16am local time. Meir's mission had lasted 205 days. Morgan's had stretched to 272 days. The capsule's departure marked the start of Expedition 63, with Cassidy in command.

  In December 2025, NASA announced Meir would return to the ISS as commander of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission, serving on Expedition 74/75 alongside Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot, and Andrey Fedyaev. The crew launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral on the 13th of February, 2026.

• 7. First and Second

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  Swedish citizenship passes through parentage, and Meir holds it through her mother's country of birth. That citizenship made her the first Swedish woman in space and the second Swedish person in space overall, after ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang. Among the personal items she brought aboard the ISS were an Israeli flag and a pair of novelty socks decorated with Stars of David and menorahs, reflecting ties to a family whose roots stretch from Baghdad to Caribou, Maine.

  Meir has visited Israel twice: once as a teenager with her parents and brother, and again in 2016 for work, when she gave a talk in Haifa at the International Space University summer session. From orbit she photographed the country from above. Most of her relatives on her father's side live there.

  On International Women's Day in 2023, Meir announced on her Instagram account the birth of her first child, a girl. Her partner, Duke Brady, is an artist and biologist who grew up in Hawaii and has appeared on two seasons of the Naked and Afraid series. Meir holds a private pilot's license, plays woodwind instruments, and speaks English, Russian, and Swedish. She received an Honorary Doctor of Technology from Luleå University of Technology in Sweden in 2020, and in 2021 was awarded both the Sir Charles Sherrington Prize Lecture and Medal from the University of Oxford and the President's Lecture and Medal from the Physiological Society of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. In 2023, she received H.M. The King's Medal of the 8th size gold with the Order of the Seraphim ribbon.