“Astronauts from Oregon: The Complete List”

Oregon has sent a surprisingly large slice of itself to orbit. Not a NASA field center, no rocket factory, no spaceport — and still the state can claim a handful of people who flew the Space Shuttle, walked in vacuum, and in one case set American spaceflight records at an age when most people are picking out recliners.

The roster splits three ways. Some astronauts were born in Oregon. Some were raised here but born elsewhere. And a couple earned the connection at Oregon State University, which has quietly put more than one of its engineering grads into a flight suit. Below is every name worth knowing, sorted by who they are and what they actually did up there — followed by a piece of history most lists skip entirely: the Apollo crews who learned to read the Moon by hiking Central Oregon’s lava beds.

Table of Contents

• Born in Oregon
• Don Pettit — Silverton
• S. David Griggs — Portland
• James P. Dutton Jr. — Eugene
• Raised in Oregon
• Stanley G. Love — Eugene
• The Oregon State University Connection
• William Oefelein
• Quick Reference Table
• Bonus: When Apollo Trained in Oregon’s “Moon Country”

Born in Oregon {#born-in-oregon}

Don Pettit — Silverton {#don-pettit}

If Oregon has a hometown astronaut, it’s Don Pettit. He was born in Silverton in 1955, earned a chemical engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1978, and went on to become one of the most recognizable working astronauts NASA has — partly for the science, mostly for the photographs.

Pettit made headlines in April 2025 when he returned from the International Space Station on his 70th birthday, landing on the Kazakh steppe after a roughly seven-month mission. That makes him one of the oldest people ever to complete a long-duration spaceflight, and across his career he has logged more than a year of cumulative time in orbit.

What sets him apart is that he tinkers. While other astronauts followed the manual, Pettit invented things in his spare time aboard the station. His most famous is the “Space Cup,” a zero-gravity drinking vessel whose curved interior uses surface tension and capillary action to pull liquid toward your lips — the closest thing to sipping a real cup of coffee in microgravity, and a genuine fluid-physics experiment that earned a patent. He also built a “barn door tracker,” a hand-cranked rig to take long-exposure star photos that don’t smear as the station races around Earth at 17,500 mph. His time-lapse footage of city lights and auroras streaming beneath the ISS has been viewed by millions.

Standout achievement: the rare astronaut who is equal parts engineer, photographer, and inventor — and still flying long-duration missions in his 70th year.

S. David Griggs — Portland {#david-griggs}

S. David Griggs was born in Portland in 1939 and flew aboard Discovery on mission STS-51-D in April 1985. That flight is remembered for an improvisation: when a satellite failed to activate after deployment, Griggs and crewmate Jeffrey Hoffman performed the first unscheduled spacewalk of the Shuttle program, rigging a makeshift “flyswatter” tool to try to trip the satellite’s switch.

A Navy pilot before NASA, Griggs was assigned to a second flight but died in 1989 when a vintage propeller aircraft he was flying crashed during a practice run in Arkansas. He never made his second trip to space, but the satellite-rescue spacewalk wrote him permanently into Shuttle history.

Standout achievement: improvised the program’s first unplanned EVA on the fly.

James P. Dutton Jr. — Eugene {#james-dutton}

Born in Eugene in 1968, James Dutton came up through the Air Force as a test pilot before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He served as pilot of Discovery on STS-131 in April 2010, a station resupply and science mission that ran 15 days and delivered tons of experiments and equipment to the ISS.

STS-131 was his only spaceflight — the Shuttle program wound down the following year — but he flew it during one of the busiest assembly-and-supply stretches of the station’s life, with a crew of seven and three spacewalks worked from inside the cockpit.

Standout achievement: piloted one of the final Shuttle resupply runs to the ISS.

Raised in Oregon {#raised-in-oregon}

Stanley G. Love — Eugene {#stanley-love}

Stan Love was born in San Diego but grew up in Eugene, which is close enough that Oregon claims him without much argument. He took a different road than the pilot-astronauts on this list: a PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington and a research background studying asteroids and the dust between the planets.

Love flew on STS-122 aboard Atlantis in February 2008, the mission that delivered the European Columbus laboratory module to the station. He performed two spacewalks to help install Columbus and swap out a depleted nitrogen tank — hours of precise work with the lab module dangling from the robotic arm above him.

Standout achievement: helped bolt Europe’s main research lab onto the ISS.

The Oregon State University Connection {#osu-connection}

Beyond birthplace and hometown, Oregon’s other pipeline to orbit runs through Corvallis. Oregon State University has educated multiple astronauts — Don Pettit among them — and the school leans into the legacy. The clearest “OSU, not Oregon-born” case is below.

William Oefelein {#william-oefelein}

William “Billy O” Oefelein considers Anchorage, Alaska his hometown, but his Oregon credential is real: he graduated from Oregon State University with an engineering degree in 1988 before becoming a Navy fighter pilot. He flew as pilot of Discovery on STS-116 in December 2006, a night launch that delivered a new truss segment and rewired the station’s power system across a tense series of spacewalks.

It was his only spaceflight. Oefelein left NASA in 2007 after a widely reported personal scandal, and his post-astronaut story took him far from the launchpad — but the OSU-to-orbit line still holds.

Standout achievement: piloted the complex STS-116 power-rewiring mission.

Quick Reference Table {#quick-reference}

Astronaut	Oregon connection	Missions	Claim to fame
Don Pettit	Born in Silverton; OSU grad	Multiple ISS expeditions + Shuttle STS-113	Invented the zero-g Space Cup; returned from the ISS on his 70th birthday
S. David Griggs	Born in Portland	STS-51-D	First unscheduled EVA in Shuttle history
James P. Dutton Jr.	Born in Eugene	STS-131	Piloted a late-program ISS resupply flight
Stanley G. Love	Raised in Eugene	STS-122	Two EVAs installing Europe’s Columbus lab
William Oefelein	OSU graduate	STS-116	Piloted the station’s power-rewiring mission

Bonus: When Apollo Trained in Oregon’s “Moon Country” {#moon-country}

Here’s the part the single-astronaut news stories never mention: before anyone from Oregon flew to space, the men headed to the actual Moon came to Oregon to practice.

In the mid-1960s, NASA needed places on Earth that resembled the lunar surface so Apollo astronauts could learn field geology — how to read volcanic terrain, describe samples, and tell a useful rock from a boring one. Central Oregon, with its young basalt flows, cinder cones, and ash, fit the bill. The lava lands around Bend, the McKenzie Pass flows, Fort Rock, and Newberry’s volcanic country became an open-air classroom that locals took to calling Oregon’s “Moon Country.”

Astronauts walked the lava with geologists, mapped outcrops, and got hands-on with the kind of volcanic rock they’d later be scooping into sample bags a quarter-million miles away. It’s why, if you hike the cracked black flows near Bend today, you’re walking ground that helped rehearse the first steps on the Moon.

So Oregon’s spaceflight story runs both directions. The state sent its own people up — a Silverton inventor still setting records at 70, a Portland pilot who improvised a spacewalk, a Eugene astronomer who built a European lab in orbit. And decades earlier, it loaned its lava fields to the people who got there first.