Megan McArthur: The Last Hands on Hubble
Megan McArthur holds a distinction no future astronaut can ever take from her: she was the last human being to physically touch the Hubble Space Telescope. As lead robotics operator on the space shuttle's final servicing mission to the observatory in 2009, she guided the Canadarm's grip on Hubble one final time before it was released back into an orbit no astronaut would ever visit again. Twelve years later, she strapped into a very different kind of spacecraft and became the first woman to pilot a SpaceX Crew Dragon — closing out a career that spanned the shuttle era and the commercial-spaceflight era in a single arc.
An Oceanographer Bound for Orbit
Katherine Megan McArthur was born August 30, 1971, in Honolulu, Hawaii, and grew up, by her own description, as a "Navy kid," moving with a military family before settling in California and graduating from St. Francis High School in Mountain View. Her academic path was unusual for an astronaut: rather than moving directly from engineering into flight training, she earned a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering from UCLA in 1993, then went on to complete a Ph.D. in oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of UC San Diego, in 2002 — after NASA had already selected her. That combination of aerospace and ocean science is not a common one among astronauts, and it gave her a research background in a field entirely separate from the one she would become famous for.
Selection and Ground Work
NASA selected McArthur as a mission specialist in July 2000, and she trained at the Sonny Carter Training Facility, NASA's neutral buoyancy pool used to simulate spacewalk conditions. Before her own missions, she served in one of NASA's most demanding ground roles: CAPCOM, the sole astronaut voice authorized to communicate directly with crews in orbit, for Space Shuttle and International Space Station missions including STS-116 (2006) and STS-117 (2007). That apprenticeship — years spent talking other astronauts through their own flights before flying herself — is typical of how NASA builds its most trusted crew members, and it meant McArthur understood mission operations from the ground side long before she experienced them from orbit.
STS-125: The Last Servicing of Hubble
In 2009, McArthur flew aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-125, the fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission — a roughly thirteen-day flight that upgraded and repaired the telescope for what NASA intended to be its final crewed visit. McArthur served as the mission's lead robotics crew member, operating the shuttle's robotic arm to capture Hubble, position spacewalking astronauts for their repairs, and finally release the telescope back into its own orbit. She has noted, with evident awareness of the moment's finality, that she would be "the last one with hands on the Hubble Space Telescope" — a literal fact, since no subsequent mission has been flown to service it, and current plans call for its eventual uncrewed deorbit.
Crew-2: Piloting the New Era
Twelve years later, McArthur commanded a different kind of first. In April 2021 she launched aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon on the Crew-2 mission, becoming the first woman to pilot the spacecraft. She served as flight engineer for Expeditions 65 and 66 aboard the International Space Station across a six-month stay, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico that November. In a detail that generated wide attention at the time, McArthur flew in the same Crew Dragon seat her husband, fellow astronaut Bob Behnken, had occupied on the vehicle's first crewed test flight the year before — making them the first married couple to fly the same spacecraft seat in NASA history. Across her two missions, McArthur logged 213 days in space.
Leadership on the Ground
McArthur's post-flight career moved steadily into NASA management. In 2017 she became assistant director of flight operations for the space station program; in 2019 she was appointed deputy chief of the Astronaut Office, one of the senior leadership posts overseeing the active astronaut corps; and by 2022 she had also taken on the role of chief science officer at Space Center Houston, the visitor-center-and-education arm associated with Johnson Space Center. She was named a Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst in 2021, and in 2022 SpaceX named a recovery vessel in her honor — an unusual tribute reserved for astronauts who have shaped the young commercial-crew program's culture, not just flown on it.
Retirement After 25 Years
McArthur retired from NASA on August 29, 2025, closing out nearly a quarter-century with the agency. She has said she intends to continue at Space Center Houston, promoting spaceflight and STEM education to the public — shifting from flying and managing missions to explaining them to the next generation likely to build on her work.
Why Megan Is Called a Genius
McArthur's case for the word rests on demonstrated technical mastery across two very different domains rather than any single flash of theoretical brilliance. Nothing in the available sourcing shows commentators or NASA formally applying the word "genius" to her; the vocabulary used instead is operational — "lead robotics crew member," "flight engineer," "deputy chief" — the language of someone trusted with extremely precise, high-consequence machine control rather than someone credited with a conceptual breakthrough. What is genuinely rare is the range: a doctorate-level oceanographer who also became one of NASA's most trusted robotic-arm operators, precise enough to be handed sole responsibility for humanity's last physical contact with one of its most valuable scientific instruments, and then, over a decade later, skilled enough in an entirely new spacecraft's systems to pilot its first crewed operational flight by a woman. That is applied technical skill of the highest order, refined over decades of training and ground-support work, not a single burst of insight — closer to what is sometimes called engineering virtuosity than to genius in the inventive sense. The honest limit of the claim is that McArthur operated systems built by thousands of other engineers; her achievement was flawless, historically significant execution under the highest possible stakes, not the underlying invention.
Legacy
McArthur's career quietly bridges two eras of American spaceflight that will likely never overlap again: the space shuttle, retired in 2011, and the commercial crew vehicles that replaced it. She is permanently the last human hand on Hubble and the first woman to pilot a Crew Dragon, two records that cannot be reassigned to anyone else no matter how spaceflight develops from here. Her shift into public science education at Space Center Houston suggests she now sees her value less in the records themselves than in making sure the science behind them reaches people who were not alive to watch her fly.
Achievements
- Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Educated at Saint Francis High School, University of California, Los Angeles and Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- Worked as astronaut and oceanographer
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