Shortly thereafter, Aunapu Mann realized she missed the engineering element of military service, which led her to apply to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. "It was a way to be a fighter pilot and an engineer — sort of put those two things together," she said.

While attending the school at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Aunapu Mann had the light bulb moment that has proved life changing.

"I came across online the biographies of a couple Marine astronauts. I was reading their bios and was like 'Ah, they flew F-18s and I fly F-18s. They went to test pilot school and I'm going to test pilot school.' It became apparent this was something I could do in the future," she said.

Aunapu Mann completed her NASA training in 2015 and served as a T-38 Talon safety and training officer as well as assistant to the Chief of Exploration. She worked on the development of the Orion spacecraft along with space launch and exploration ground systems.

Being named commander of the SpaceX Crew-5 mission was both an amazing honor and massive responsibility. In that role, Aunapu Mann led an international team that included another Navy pilot, a Japanese astronaut and Russian cosmonaut.

Endurance launched on Oct. 5, 2022, and flew to the International Space Station as part of Expedition 68 with Crew-5 contributing to hundreds of experiments and technology demonstrations.

"It was the most incredible thing I've ever done. You spend so much time training for your mission onboard the space station, so when you get up there you are so excited to put all that training to work," said Aunapu Mann, noting the work involved everything from maintenance such as upgrading the CO2 scrubbers to working with flying robots and training for spacewalks.

While at the Johnson Space Center in advance of the mission, Aunapu Mann prepared for her two spacewalks inside the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. That involved training for six hours at a time underwater in one of the world's largest pools with weight and foam used to manipulate buoyancy to simulate full or partial gravity.

However, nothing could prepare Aunapu Mann for actually putting on a space suit and venturing outside the station through an airlock. Her assignment was to perform upgrades to the space station's solar arrays.

"When you go out the door it's amazing how similar a lot of the training is to doing an actual spacewalk," she said, "except you don't have that stability of the water. While you don't weigh anything in space, you still have a lot of mass and a lot of momentum, so you have to learn how to control that and you have to use a lot of finesse in order to be effective.

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