A flip through the online archives of NC State University’s Technician from the start of the millennium pulls up headlines and scenes you’d expect from a student newspaper. University administrators meeting with student leaders. A new director of the alumni association. Updates on campus construction projects.
Eagle-eyed readers might spot a familiar name attached to the pages’ photos: Christina Hammock. That’s how she was known before she married and became Christina Koch, the name more closely associated with a history-making NASA career in which she recorded the longest spaceflight by a woman, participated in the first all-female spacewalk, and became the first woman to orbit the moon.
Koch attended NC State from 1997 to 2002 and earned undergraduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering, as well as a master’s degree in the latter. That’s a combination of disciplines that one of Koch’s physics professors described to The Assembly as one of the most difficult at the university, but her studies apparently didn’t prevent her from staying busy outside the classroom. Among other activities, Koch was a member of the sailing club, participated in community service, and took up rock climbing.
She also found time to take more than a dozen photos for the Technician in the early 2000s. Her portfolio runs the gamut. There are multiple action shots of the Wolfpack women’s soccer team. A two-page spread from the 2000 N.C. State Fair includes four images by Koch, the most of any photographer who contributed to the feature. And slices of campus life abound, like a front-page image of several “Raging Grannies” outside D.H. Hill Library and another of two professors smoking a pipe and “shoot[ing] the shit.”
This year, Koch was credited with taking “Earthset,” an historic image of our planet sinking below the moon’s horizon, as part of the Artemis II space mission in April. It bears significant similarities to “Earthrise,” the iconic photograph taken on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Koch hung the latter on her college dorm room’s wall.
On a NASA podcast in 2019, Koch said she’s “always” considered photography a hobby and that it was among the tasks she was most looking forward to once she reached the International Space Station that year. She has also spoken of taking a high-speed photography class as a student at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, the prestigious residential high school that is part of the UNC System. “I was famous for my time in the dark room there,” she told a group of NCSSM and NC State students while she was aboard the Space Station. (She wasn’t available for an interview for this story, per a NASA spokesperson.)
James Curle, who served as the Technician’s photo editor while Koch was on staff, recalled her as a quiet but driven presence. She seemed drawn to the idea of documenting her surroundings, and she was always trying to bring back better images to the newsroom than she did on her previous assignments, Curle said.
“I think that desire for improvement and wanting to capture what she was seeing in the world around her translated into her career with NASA,” Curle said.
Indeed, the girl who grew up near the North Carolina coast loving things that made her “feel small”—the ocean, the night sky—seemingly never stopped pursuing opportunities that would bring her closer to her dream of going to space.
‘The Power of Creativity’
Koch, 47, was born in Michigan but moved to Jacksonville as a child and calls North Carolina home. With parents “from scientific backgrounds” who kept National Geographic and Popular Mechanics around the house, she told The News & Observer in 2016, she took an early interest in exploring the world around her and tinkering with machines and tools in the backyard shed.
Newspaper clips from Koch’s childhood show she excelled academically, earning a spot on the honor roll at her elementary school, St. Francis of Assisi, in third grade. As a seventh-grader at Hunters Creek Middle School in 1992, she was recognized by Duke University’s Talent Identification Program for her scores on the SAT. The following year, she earned first place at the state’s Southeast Regional Science Fair for a project on “The Common Sense of Geometric Formulas.”
But it wasn’t all books for Koch.
“I was a cheerleader that had to take off from cheerleading camp to go get an academic award at Duke University in middle school,” she recalled in an NC State interview in 2021.
At White Oak High School in Jacksonville, which Koch attended before transferring to NCSSM in Durham, she cheered alongside her friend, Melanie Edwards. NASA included a photo of the pair in their Vikings cheer uniforms in its 2013 announcement of Koch’s astronaut class and in an Instagram video the agency posted shortly before the Artemis II mission.
“Honors classes, cheerleading, she moved through all of it without seeming overwhelmed,” Edwards told The Assembly by email recently. “What I remember most is that her curiosity was never confined to a classroom.”
Koch, though, has said she’s not without doubts. In a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, she reflected on a sculpture of her that sits at the main entrance to the NCSSM campus in Durham, saying that she worries it is “too perfect of a representation” of her and might discourage students from following their dreams. In a speech she gave at the sculpture’s dedication, Koch said, she “made sure to talk about the person I was in high school and how unsure I was of myself.”
Koch also took an interest in the arts.
In seventh grade, Koch told The Daily News of Jacksonville that band was her favorite class: “The music relaxes you and takes your mind away from school stress.” (Perhaps that explains why Koch was disappointed when mission control cut off Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” played to wake up the Artemis II crew on their fourth flight day, before the chorus.)
Koch was also featured in a 1997 N&O story about how the School of Science and Math encouraged students to foster “their own theories of creativity.” In one class, Koch told the paper, she learned from her teacher to “draw only what you see rather than what you think you see”—a lesson that likely came in handy as she recorded her observations of the moon with paper and pencil after her computer failed in space.
At NCSSM, Koch “realized the power of creativity,” she told students in 2019. She said she also learned how to turn “fear into focus” by staring down the “mountain” of homework that faced her each night—and later applied that lesson to her first spacewalk.
“I really just can’t say enough about the different opportunities that I had that led me to want to live a life to explore,” she said of her NCSSM experience.
Joining the Wolfpack
Koch landed at NC State because of its strong physics and electrical engineering programs. She knew she wanted to study both, she told former NC State Chancellor Randy Woodson in 2023, because the former catered to her interest in the theories behind the universe and the latter to her love of “tinkering” and applying knowledge to hands-on scenarios.
It helped that the university was in her home state. “I could be at a public university, which is meant to support the people that are local, that are North Carolinians, and that have so much pride in this state,” she told Woodson. “And NC State just represented doers.”
She excelled in Raleigh—even with a heavy course load.
If the work weighed on Koch, she didn’t let it show, said Steve Reynolds, Koch’s academic advisor in the physics department who hired her for a summer research project in 1999. “She was just always happy, it seemed like,” he said.
John Blondin, a physics professor who taught Koch in upper-level courses and supervised her on that research project, recalled that Koch signed her homework assignments like a “classic 19-year-old college girl” with her nickname “Tina,” often with a heart drawn as the dot above the i.
Koch was quick to volunteer for one of the most challenging tasks on the research project, which involved coding, Blondin said. She also made a Tesla coil during her downtime that summer just because she “thought that would be cool,” Reynolds said.
“She was just so energetic,” Reynolds said. “It sort of makes me tired just to think about.”
Blondin and Reynolds learned early in their work with Koch that she wanted to be an astronaut, and both believed she could accomplish the feat despite the long odds. Reynolds offered a vote of confidence in a recommendation letter he wrote to accompany Koch’s application for an Astronaut Scholarship during her sophomore year.
“Christina Hammock is an exceptional individual in every way. Least interestingly, she has essentially a 4.0 GPA. More telling is her motivation for excellence in school: a lifelong dream to join the space program,” Reynolds wrote. “At NC State, her overpowering desire to learn and understand are evident in every class, but she extends her interests beyond the classroom as well, giving evidence of a deep scientific curiosity. … Such quantitative talent is rarely found in as articulate, enthusiastic, and personable an individual as Ms. Hammock.”
But Koch knew it would take more than academic success to become an astronaut; she has described walking away from a class on “How to Be an Astronaut” at Space Camp, which she attended every summer from 1992 to 1996, with a feeling that she didn’t want to live her life “according to a checklist.” Instead, she would live by her passions—and if, in the course of those pursuits, she felt she gained the experiences necessary to contribute to the space program, she would apply.
That outlook took Koch to research stations in Antarctica, Alaska, and American Samoa before she got the call from NASA.
At NC State, her work for the Technician combined the artful hobbies that she’d discovered growing up with her gift for observing her surroundings. Curle, the former Technician photo editor, said Koch had a knack for finding and documenting “visually interesting” scenes on campus that would often run as standalone photos on the front page.
“It was pretty clear from the jump that she was not just someone who had a casual interest in photography,” he said. “It was clear that she had an eye for it.”
Curle says he had little, if anything, to do with Koch’s photography skills, which she further honed with 20 hours of specialized photography instruction as part of her Artemis mission training. But as Koch documented the moon this spring, Curle thought about what she learned all those years ago at the Technician and whether that influenced her work now. Maybe if the other astronauts needed assistance with their image composition, he thought, they could lean on Koch.
“For some folks, these are just pictures,” Curle said. “But I like to think that Christina appreciated the art and the beauty of it as she was making that journey and capturing those images.”
That certainly appears to be the case. In an April 7 call between Koch’s Artemis II crew and the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, she reflected: “The thing that changed for me looking back at Earth was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it, and how it just made it even more special.”
“It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she said. “We evolved on the same planet, we have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal, and the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it.”
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