Australian Astronauts: Every Aussie Who Reached Space

Ask “who was the first Australian astronaut?” and you’ll get four different answers depending on who’s arguing. That’s not a trivia gap — it’s a genuine tangle of citizenship, employers, and what “astronaut” even means. Two of the men flew under the American flag. One trained but never launched. And the woman now getting the most attention reached space training under no flag at all, because Australia didn’t have a human spaceflight program until she helped make one.

So here’s the whole list, sorted out properly. Four people, three of whom have actually been to space, plus the one who’s about to redefine what an Australian astronaut is.

Quick Reference

Name	Born	Missions	Years Active	Flew As
Philip Chapman	Melbourne, 1935	0 (scientist-astronaut, never flew)	1967–1972	NASA (US citizen)
Paul Scully-Power	Sydney, 1944	1 (STS-41-G)	1984	NASA payload specialist
Andy Thomas	Adelaide, 1951	4 (incl. Mir, ISS)	1992–2010	NASA (US citizen)
Katherine Bennell-Pegg	Sydney, 1989	0 yet (qualified 2024)	2022–present	Australia / ESA training

The “Who Was First” Problem, Solved

The confusion comes from three different finish lines, and people keep mixing them up.

First Australian-born person in space? That’s Paul Scully-Power, who flew aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in October 1984. Born in Sydney, he was the first person born in Australia to reach orbit — full stop.

First Australian to join a national astronaut corps? Philip Chapman beat everyone. NASA selected the Melbourne-born physicist as a scientist-astronaut in 1967, a full 17 years before Scully-Power flew. The catch: Chapman never got a mission. He resigned in 1972 having never left the ground.

First Australian citizen to fly while holding citizenship? Andy Thomas usually gets this title, though he’d become a US citizen by the time he flew. He’s the most accomplished Australian in space by a wide margin — four flights, a long-duration stay on Mir, and a spacewalk.

First astronaut trained under Australia’s own program? Katherine Bennell-Pegg, qualified in 2024. The first three all wore NASA blue. She’s the first to earn astronaut wings representing Australia itself.

Four people, four different “firsts.” All of them technically correct. That’s why the question never has a clean answer.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg

Bennell-Pegg is the reason astronaut searches around Australia have spiked, and in January 2026 she was named Australian of the Year. She’s the first person to train as an astronaut under the Australian flag — not as a NASA recruit who happened to be Australian, but as Australia’s own.

She trained through the European Space Agency’s class of 2022 in Cologne, Germany, completing the full basic training program and graduating in April 2024. The Australian Space Agency, where she works as Director of Space Technology, backed her place. When she graduated, she did so with an Australian flag on her shoulder — the first to ever do that.

Born in Sydney in 1989, she studied aerospace engineering and went the long way around: she worked in the European space industry for years before the astronaut path opened up. She’s spoken often about applying to space agencies that didn’t take Australian applicants, which is part of why her training under Australia’s own banner lands the way it does. She hasn’t flown to space yet. But she’s qualified and assigned to the ESA astronaut reserve, and her training graduation is the milestone that changed the answer to “does Australia have astronauts?” from “sort of” to “yes.”

Andy Thomas

If you want the Australian who actually did the most in space, it’s Andy Thomas. Born in Adelaide in 1951, he trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Adelaide, moved to the US for work, and was selected by NASA in 1992. He’d taken US citizenship in 1986, which is why his “first Australian” claim comes with an asterisk — but he never stopped identifying as a South Australian, and Adelaide claims him hard.

His record is the real story. Four spaceflights between 1996 and 2005. The standout was a 130-day stay aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1998, where he was the last American astronaut to live on the station before it was deorbited. He flew on the first Shuttle mission to dock with Mir’s successor work, served on the International Space Station program, and was aboard STS-114 in 2005 — the first Shuttle flight after the Columbia disaster, one of the most scrutinized launches in NASA history.

He logged more than 177 days in space across his career and performed a spacewalk. No other Australian comes close to that flight record, and given the gap before Bennell-Pegg flies, he’ll hold it for a while.

Paul Scully-Power

Scully-Power gets the cleanest “first” of the bunch: first Australian-born human in space. Born in Sydney in 1944, he flew aboard Challenger on mission STS-41-G in October 1984 as a payload specialist — a scientist sent up for a specific research job rather than a career astronaut.

His job was oceanography. Scully-Power was an oceanographer working for the US Navy, and his mission focused on observing ocean features from orbit, particularly internal waves and eddies that are far easier to spot from 350 kilometres up than from a ship. The mission also carried Sally Ride on her second flight and Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut, making STS-41-G a crowded, history-dense flight.

He flew once and didn’t return to space, but the record stands: the first person born on Australian soil to reach orbit was a Navy oceanographer studying the sea from above it.

Philip Chapman

Chapman is the deepest cut and the one most people have never heard of. Born in Melbourne in 1935, he was selected by NASA in August 1967 as part of the agency’s scientist-astronaut group — the first Australian-born person ever chosen for an astronaut corps, beating Scully-Power’s flight by 17 years.

He had the credentials: a physics and astronautics background, an MIT doctorate, and work on the Apollo program. He served as a mission scientist on Apollo 14. But the late 1960s and early 1970s were brutal for new astronauts — NASA had more astronauts than seats as Apollo wound down and budgets shrank. Chapman waited, didn’t get a flight assignment, and resigned in 1972.

So he holds a strange distinction: the first Australian astronaut by selection, and the only one on this list who never went to space. He spent his later career in private aerospace and as an advocate for space settlement. A first that comes with an asterisk the size of a launch tower.

What’s Next for Australian Spaceflight

For decades Australia’s relationship with human spaceflight was outsourcing — talented people who had to leave and fly someone else’s flag. The Australian Space Agency, founded in 2018, is young, and it doesn’t launch crewed missions of its own. Bennell-Pegg’s training was done through ESA, not a homegrown program.

But the shift is real. Australia now has a person qualified to fly as one of its own, a national agency backing space careers, and growing involvement in international programs including NASA’s Artemis effort. The next Australian first that matters won’t be a definitional argument about citizenship and employers. It’ll be Bennell-Pegg’s launch date — the first time someone reaches space as an Australian astronaut, with no asterisk attached.