Ben Bailey (astronaut)

Bailey joined the U.S. Army as an aviation warrant officer and began initial entry rotary wing training at Fort Rucker to qualify as a helicopter pilot. From 2016 to 2022, Bailey was assigned to Joint Base Lewis–McChord as a UH-60M Black Hawk pilot.

In 2022, following fixed-wing transition training, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School where he received the Commander Willie McCool award as the top performing student in Class 161^[2]. He then served at the U.S. Army Redstone Test Center, Aviation Flight Test Directorate, as an experimental test pilot responsible for evaluating new technologies in the UH-60 and Boeing CH-47 Chinook airframes. As of his astronaut selection in 2025, Bailey was a senior-rated Army aviator with more than 2,000 flight hours across 30 different airframes including both rotary and fixed-wing.^[1]

In September 2025, Bailey was selected as a member of NASA Astronaut Group 24, becoming the first warrant officer selected for the NASA Astronaut Corps, and the second selected for spaceflight, following CW4 Thomas J. Hennen, who flew a mission as a payload specialist in 1991.^[3] He reported for duty at NASA's Johnson Space Center in September 2025 to begin the two year course of training.