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Pink hair, ripped jeans, and an “inexplicable love of rockets.”
That’s how astronaut Christina Koch remembers herself as an undergraduate at NC State University. Walking into those first classes, she said she felt like “everyone else in this room surely had received a manual that I didn’t.”
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She’s sure come a long way — longer than anyone. This spring, she went farther into space than any human has before, travelling around to the dark side of the moon on the Artemis II mission.
She was welcomed back to Earth with a high-octane event at her alma mater Monday, dubbed To The Moon and Pack Again. Koch earned her bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and physics at NC State, as well as a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
She has certainly not lost her Wolfpack pride.
Those “700,000 miles around the moon did not begin in a launch pad,” she said to the crowd. “They began on Stinson Drive.” That street on NC State campus is named for Katherine Stinson, the first woman to earn an engineering degree at NC State.
As a young person, Koch says she “wasn’t sure my name could do that.” She didn’t know then that she was capable of leaving a legacy like Stinson’s.
That version of herself was proven wrong on Monday. Chancellor Kevin Howell announced that Engineering Building II on Centennial Campus would henceforth be known as Koch Hall in her honor.
But that’s not all. Howell also announced a brand-new berry-flavored ice cream for Koch — a limited-time flavor named Howl at the Moon. NC State operates Howling Cow, an ice cream brand made with milk from the school’s dairy farm and processed at the dairy lab on campus.
“That was quite a surprise,” Koch, a self-described ice cream-lover, said.
Koch says she doesn’t like the spotlight. She said she even cringes when the birthday song is sung to her. So Monday was “a little different,” she joked. Her picture was everywhere, banners bore her name, and she was lauded with praise by Gov. Josh Stein.
“As much as I might not want recognition [and] superlatives [that] don’t necessarily represent the journey, they do allow people to understand the moment and to bring people in,” she said. “And that, I can accept.”
In return, Koch said she plans to be more to NC State students than just a name on a building.
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“I will keep coming back,” she said. “Not just for ribbon cuttings, but for office hours. For the students in the fourth row who think they’re the only ones in the room who don’t understand, and maybe haven’t been told yet that’s not a disqualification.”
The starstruck aerospace majors in the crowd couldn’t get enough.
“The Artemis missions were my reason,” said Madison Jurasek, a 20-year-old aerospace engineering major at NC State. “I took an astronomy class as a sophomore in high school. We talked about the Artemis missions. I knew then: that’s what I want to do with the rest of my life.”
Because of Koch, space flight feels possible for some NC State students. A lunar mission “is definitely on the to-do list,” said 22-year-old aerospace engineering major Lydia Ball. “I’m going to work hard like she did.”
Koch credits her professors and teachers in North Carolina for nourishing that “unlikely” dream of becoming an astronaut. Now, she hopes to do that for the next generation.
A group of “junior journalists” aged 5 to 10 asked Koch questions during her media availability after the event. One 5-year-old girl asked how she can be brave like Koch.
“Some people think that courage is … not having any fear,” Koch responded. “I think it is doing the things that are important even when you are a little bit scared or a little bit nervous.”
The next intimidating task Koch will take on? Repairing her family’s sailboat, a vessel that hasn’t moved from her father’s backyard for eight years. “I don’t know how to fix [a boat] from scratch,” she said. “But it’s extremely motivating for me because it’s very important to my family. That’s the first challenge I’m going to take on.”
As for whether she plans to be one of the astronauts who ultimately lands on the moon in a future Artemis mission, Koch said indicated that it’s unlikely. She said she hopes “to see my friends go and do that mission and to cheer them on as loudly as I possibly can when they do that.”
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