Jonny Kim

Jonny Kim (born February 5, 1984, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) Korean American Navy SEAL, doctor, aviator, and astronaut who is a member of NASA’s Artemis team, which aims to land humans on the Moon for the first time since 1972. Kim is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy.

Early life and Navy service

Kim was born to South Korean immigrants in Los Angeles on February 5, 1984. His parents arrived in the United States in the early 1980s and opened a liquor store, which they ran together while Kim’s mother worked part-time as a substitute teacher. His father did not have a formal education, and Kim said he worked hard, often six days a week. Kim’s family life during his childhood was difficult. He has shared publicly that his father was abusive to him, his mother, and his younger brother. In February 2002, when Kim was a high-school senior, his father threatened him and his mother with a gun. That same evening Kim’s father was shot and killed in the family home during a confrontation with police. In a 2020 episode of the Jocko Podcast, Kim recounted the way in which the tragedy has shaped his adult life:

• It’s just a day, for so many reasons, that helped me be reborn into the person that I’ve wanted to become—always wanted to become....

Kim first heard of the Navy SEALs while in high school at Santa Monica High, where he was an excellent but shy student. He became determined to enlist, despite his mother’s wishes for him to attend university. After he graduated high school in 2002, Kim enlisted as a seaman recruit with the U.S. Navy. He completed a variety of specialized trainings, including the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) course and combat medicine before being assigned to a SEAL team based in San Diego, California.

Throughout his military career, Kim continued to pursue numerous training opportunities and became an accomplished parachutist, SCUBA and combat diver, and reconnaissance scout and sniper. He was deployed to Iraq twice during the Iraq War and operated as a medic, sniper, navigator, and point man across more than 100 combat operations. Kim was awarded the Silver Star for rescuing wounded Iraqi soldiers while under fire in June 2006.

That same year, while on duty in Al-Ramādī, Iraq, two of Kim’s close friends were shot. Kim, serving as a medic, applied aid to one of them, but neither survived. The feelings of helplessness that struck him that day partly inspired Kim to become a doctor.

“I made a promise to my fallen brothers that I would live my best life in a way that betters the world in their honor. For me, medicine was the answer to that,” Kim said in a Navy press release.

Harvard, NASA, and beyond

Kim enrolled at the University of San Diego in 2009, completing his mathematics degree in three years and attaining officer rank through the Navy’s enlisted-to-officer commissioning program. After graduating he began his medical studies at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he met astronaut and physician Scott Parazynski, who encouraged Kim to consider applying for NASA’s astronaut candidate program. Kim had dreamed of being an astronaut as a child—he once had a poster of the Apollo 11 crew above his bed—and so he agreed. Kim graduated from Harvard in 2016, earning an M.D., and one year into his four-year residency in emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, he was selected to join NASA as one of a dozen candidates out of a pool of more than 18,000.

Kim left his residency in the summer of 2017, delaying his service in the Navy Medical Corps, to begin his astronaut training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. He and his fellow candidates were trained in underwater survival and aviation, specifically piloting T-6A Texan II planes. Next, in Houston, Kim learned to pilot T-38s and continue his training with NASA’s Artemis program, which involved instruction on a broad range of subjects, including International Space Station (ISS) systems, robotics, geology, survival training, and the Russian language. The program trains crew designated for missions to the ISS, the Moon, and even Mars. Graduates of the program also work to support ISS crews in space.

Kim graduated from the training program in 2020 and was named a member of the Artemis team that same year. It is expected that every astronaut will make it to space eventually; however, only 8 out of NASA’s 41 active astronauts will be sent on Moon missions for the Artemis II and III flights. (Kim was not selected as a member of the Artemis II crew but remains eligible for one of the four spots on the Artemis III mission.) Kim became a capsule communicator for ISS operations at the Mission Control Center in Houston and also served as increment lead for the 2021 research mission ISS Expedition 65, as well as an operations officer supporting NASA crew. He has yet to be scheduled for spaceflight.

Convinced of the value of pursuing additional aviation training in preparation for spaceflight, Kim left Houston in early 2022 for primary flight training at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas—quickly followed by advanced helicopter flight training at Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Milton, Florida. After completing these training programs in addition to a naval flight surgeon course, Kim earned the elite title of aeromedical dual designator on March 24, 2023, indicating his status as both an aviator and a flight surgeon.

Kim is married, and he and his wife are the parents of three children. He credits his family with much of his success, saying: “Oftentimes when you see people accomplishing things, you don’t see the support network behind them.”