Editor’s note: Each month, Dispatch reporters will profile astronauts from Ohio, culminating in a larger story toward the end of the year about all Ohioans who became astronauts.
Like many Ohio astronauts before him, Gregory H. Johnson traces his dream of spaceflight to Neil Armstrong.
Johnson was 7 years old when his dad woke him up after his bedtime to watch on his grandparents' black-and-white TV as Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface. Nearly four decades later, the Fairborn graduate piloted two Space Shuttle missions to help assemble the International Space Station.
Johnson, now 64, grew up around Air Force bases, like Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, so he was always looking up. His family moved around a lot for his
father's career as an Air Force band leader. If asked, Johnson says he's from Michigan and Ohio. His parents are from Traverse City, Michigan, so he visited his grandparents there often, but Johnson attended Park Hills High School in Fairborn, Ohio, for all four years and graduated as the valedictorian.
After leaving Ohio, Johnson got a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Air Force Academy and a master's from Columbia University. He become a pilot in the Air Force and flew the F-15E in Operations Desert Storm and Southern Watch.
"You have two kinds of astronauts; you have the pilots and the smart ones," Johnson joked of how he got to become an astronaut. "So I was a pilot. When the Air Force submitted me as a pilot, it was a much smaller pool. That's really how I think I got the opportunity. I had a good pilot résumé and I had some good educational background."
Johnson was sworn to secrecy when NASA selected him as an astronaut in 1998. But when he got the call at a gala alongside legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, Johnson couldn't hide his excitement.
"Don't do it," Yeager joked, according to Johnson.
Johnson smiled and told him, "General, you broke the sound barrier in 1947. If I want to make a mark on aerospace, I'm going to have to go to space."
Johnson joined NASA in 1998 and a decade later, he was the pilot on a 16-day Space Shuttle mission, one of the missions that helped construct the International Space Station (ISS). Two years later, he flew as a pilot on the the penultimate Space Shuttle mission, another 16-day mission to the ISS.
"On the scale of astronauts, I'm way toward the bottom of the list, but I still was lucky to go and I'd like to try to ignite the fire with kids, like my fire was ignited when I was a kid," Johnson said. "Space is like a magical place."
To any Ohio kids who might dream of becoming an astronaut some day, Johnson said he thought it was impossible before.
"I would say, you should go for it," Johnson said. "Because somebody's going to become an astronaut and it could be you."
Johnson is retiring before November from working as a test pilot at Lockheed Martin. He's looking forward to making up for lost time with his family after spending so much time away in his career.
"As an astronaut, you orbit the Earth every 90 minutes," Johnson said. "And so, a 16-day flight, it's about 250 orbits around the Earth. And you just see all the wonderful places around the world, and so I want to go to some of those places."
Reporter Jordan Laird can be reached at jlaird@dispatch.com. Follow her on X, Instagram and Bluesky at @LairdWrites.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio astronaut Gregory H. Johnson traces his dream to Neil Armstrong
