Jeffrey A Hoffman

Background and Experience

Jeffrey Alan Hoffman is an American former NASA astronaut and currently a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Hoffman made five flights as a Space Shuttle astronaut, including the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, when the orbiting telescope's flawed optical system was corrected. Trained as an astrophysicist, he also flew on the 1990 Spacelab Shuttle mission that featured the Astro-1 ultraviolet astronomical observatory in the Shuttle's payload bay. Over the course of his five missions, he logged more than 1,211 hours and 21.5 million miles in space. He was also NASA's second Jewish astronaut, and the second Jewish man in space after Soviet cosmonaut Boris Volynov. He joined the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics faculty in 2001 as a senior lecturer, and since 2002 has been a professor of the Practice in that department. His research specialties include human space flight operations, space flight technology, human-machine interactions, extravehicular activity, and conducting laboratory research in space. His teaching interests include space systems design and space policy