Astronauts from Vermont: The Surprising Real Answer

Here’s the short version: no astronaut born in Vermont has ever flown to space. Not one. The Green Mountain State shares that distinction with only Nevada and Wyoming, making it one of just three states that has never sent a native son or daughter past the Kármán line.

But “no Vermonter has flown” and “Vermont has no astronaut story” are two very different statements. One man born in Newport was selected by NASA in the 1960s and resigned before he ever got a mission. A UVM medical school graduate just made NASA’s 2025 astronaut class. And there’s a Challenger memorial sitting in the state capital. The full picture is more interesting than the trivia-night factoid suggests.

Table of Contents

• The quick answer
• Vermont astronaut connections at a glance
• Duane Graveline: the one who was selected
• Imelda Muller: Vermont’s best current shot
• Why no Vermont native has flown
• The Montpelier Challenger Memorial
• So, are there astronauts from Vermont?

The quick answer {#the-quick-answer}

If you’re here because someone insisted “Vermont is the only state without an astronaut,” you can correct them on one detail: it’s one of three, not the only one. Vermont, Nevada, and Wyoming are the holdouts. According to Wikipedia’s tally of astronaut birthplaces by US state, every other state has produced at least one person who has flown in space.

That said, the word “from” does a lot of work. Astronauts get counted by birthplace, but plenty of people associated with a place were educated, raised, or trained somewhere other than where they were born. Vermont has at least two genuine astronaut ties worth knowing — one historical, one unfolding right now — even though neither person was both born in the state and flew to orbit.

Vermont astronaut connections at a glance {#at-a-glance}

Name	Vermont link	Mission status
Duane Graveline	Born in Newport, VT	Selected 1965, resigned before any flight
Imelda Muller	UVM Larner College of Medicine grad (2017)	2025 NASA astronaut candidate, in training

Two names, two very different eras, and one shared theme: Vermont keeps getting close to space without quite punching a ticket.

Duane Graveline: the one who was selected {#duane-graveline}

Duane Graveline was born in Newport, Vermont, in 1931, which makes him the closest thing the state has to a native astronaut. He’s a NASA-selected astronaut by birth — and that’s exactly why his story is the one that breaks people’s assumptions.

Graveline trained as a physician and a flight surgeon, and in June 1965 NASA picked him as part of its first group of scientist-astronauts. He had the title. He had the assignment. What he didn’t get was a flight.

His tenure ended almost as fast as it began. Personal circumstances — a contentious divorce that became public — led him to resign from the astronaut corps just months after his selection, before he was ever assigned a mission, let alone launched. He went on to a long career in aerospace medicine and writing, but the spaceflight that would have made Vermont an “astronaut state” never happened.

So when the reference books say zero Vermont-born astronauts have flown, Graveline is the asterisk. He’s the reason the technically-correct answer is “selected, never flown” rather than a flat “never had one.”

Imelda Muller: Vermont’s best current shot {#imelda-muller}

The most recent chapter is also the most promising. In September 2025, NASA named its newest class of astronaut candidates, and one of them has a clear Vermont pedigree: Dr. Imelda Muller, a 2017 graduate of the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine.

Muller’s background reads like it was designed for the job. Before space, she worked as a Navy undersea medical officer — the deep-sea-to-deep-space pipeline is more real than it sounds, since both demand managing human physiology in hostile, isolated, high-pressure environments. The VTDigger profile of her selection traces that arc from the Navy to NASA.

She’s a Vermont Space Grant alumna too, which is why the state’s space education network has claimed her enthusiastically as one of their own. Being named an astronaut candidate isn’t the same as flying, though. Candidates go through roughly two years of training — robotics, spacewalk skills, Russian language, T-38 jet flight — before they’re certified as flight-eligible astronauts and put in the rotation for a mission. Muller is in that pipeline now.

If she flies, the technicality gets interesting. Muller wasn’t born in Vermont, so she wouldn’t reset the birthplace count. But she’d be the first person with a substantive Vermont connection to actually reach space, which is the milestone most people mean when they ask the question.

Why no Vermont native has flown {#why-no-native}

It’s tempting to look for a deep reason, but the honest answer is mostly math.

Vermont is the second-least-populous state in the country, with around 650,000 residents. NASA has selected fewer than 400 astronauts total across its entire history. When you’re drawing a few hundred names from a national population of hundreds of millions, the smallest states are simply the most likely to come up empty — not because Vermonters lack the right stuff, but because the sample size is brutal.

The other two holdout states reinforce the point: Nevada and Wyoming are both low-population states as well. There’s no Vermont-specific barrier, no missing aerospace industry that doomed the state’s chances. It’s the same statistical luck that explains why a small town might go a century without producing a senator. Spread the selections thin enough across the map, and a few low-population squares stay blank.

Graveline nearly broke the streak by birth. Muller might break the spirit of it by training and education. Neither outcome required Vermont to be special — just for the right individual to come along.

The Montpelier Challenger Memorial {#challenger-memorial}

There’s one more Vermont space landmark worth a stop. In Montpelier — the smallest state capital in the country — sits a memorial to the seven crew members of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which broke apart shortly after launch in January 1986.

The memorial is a quiet reminder that a state doesn’t need to launch someone to be part of the spaceflight story. Vermont schoolchildren watched that mission for the same reason kids everywhere did: Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from neighboring New Hampshire, was aboard as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space program. The loss landed hard across all of New England. The Montpelier marker keeps that connection visible decades later.

So, are there astronauts from Vermont? {#conclusion}

The clean answer to “are there astronauts from Vermont” depends entirely on how strict you want to be.

By the strictest definition — born in the state and flew to space — the count is zero, and Vermont stays on the short list of three states that have never sent a native to orbit. By a looser, more honest definition, Vermont has Duane Graveline, a Newport-born man NASA actually selected, and Imelda Muller, a UVM-trained physician currently training for a flight that could finally put a real Vermont connection in space.

So the next time the trivia question comes up, you’ve got the complete answer: one selected but grounded, one in training, and a whole lot of statistical bad luck in between. Vermont’s astronaut story isn’t empty. It’s just still being written.