Over the moon: Livingston friends share memories of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch

LIVINGSTON — Astronaut Christina Koch — who was several hundred thousand miles from Earth on the Artemis II mission to travel around the moon last week — was living in Livingston in 2013 when she got word she’d been accepted to astronaut school, just one of eight out of more than 6,000 applicants.

But her connection to the area came via Antarctica, with a side trip via Yellowstone National Park.

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Like any would-be astronaut, Koch was “checking off boxes” to beef up her astronaut resume when she applied for and received work in Antarctica, explains Livingston resident Ken Keenan, who met Koch there about 20 years ago.

Keenan was working in maintenance at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, located at the geographic South Pole.

Koch was working there as a science tech — mostly keeping equipment running in the way-below zero temperatures — and hopefully demonstrating to NASA’s hiring committee an ability to work in remote, physically and mentally challenging environments.

Keenan said he and Koch dated for about seven years up to shortly before she was accepted into the prestigious astronaut training class.

Keenan was in Antarctica thanks to some of his co-workers from Yellowstone National Park.

At the time, he had worked several years driving snow coach out of Old Faithful in winter and working at the Lake Area in summer.

“It was a good gig,” he said.

A couple of his friends had found jobs in Antarctica and convinced him to apply. Those friends had spent winters in another harsh winter environment — Old Faithful Snow Lodge.

Old Faithful is not quite so cold and isolated, of course, but the daylight is short around the winter solstice, and you have to play well with others and get along in a relatively small community.

And while many of the jobs in Antarctica are science-based technical jobs, it also takes a lot of unscientific staff to keep the base operating. There are jobs in maintenance and logistics, as well as food service and janitorial work.

Antarctica is a military-free treaty zone, and while there are no bases there, many countries run scientific outposts. The United States has three such bases, doing research in a variety of subjects, including weather and atmospherics, astronomy and marine sciences, to name just a few.

One of Koch’s jobs, Keenan explained, was maintaining scientific equipment in way-below zero degrees Fahrenheit, including, ironically enough, keeping equipment cool.

And appropriately enough for a future astronaut, she oversaw keeping the telescopes operating. They need liquid nitrogen and helium to super-cool their instrumentation. The crystal-clear atmosphere is ideal for pointing telescopes into space.

Keenan, who still works full-time as a base manager and spends part of the South Pole summer in Antarctica, found he loved the work and the environment — and the pay is very good, especially without food or housing costs during time “on the ice.”

Keenan emphasized he was speaking only for himself and not as a representative of any scientific agency or his employer.

Another Yellowstone employee who worked at the South Pole is Bozeman resident Tom Woods. These days, Woods teaches physics at Montana State, and he’s also a former Montana legislator. Woods spent the summer of 2004-2005 (from October to late February) as a utility technician.

“I built stuff, and I fixed stuff,” Woods said.

He said there’s also a Montana and an MSU connection to Antarctica, per a manager there, Floyd Washington, who quipped to Woods why he liked to hire from Montana.

“‘You Montana kids, you’re not very smart, and you’re certainly not very good looking, but you work hard and you tolerate the cold,’” Woods recalled Washington saying.

Woods loved the experience.

“The station is all about science, so it’s full of nerd and eccentric people, of which I consider myself to be both of those,” he quipped.

Woods is a good friend of Keenan’s, and got to know Koch as well, during their shared time there. He quipped that they all drank a margarita together once a month, an event they jokingly called “Cinco de Montho.”

Woods described Koch as, “very sharp, but very normal,” adding later, “she’s very giving. Very kind.”

“She’s physically really adept,” he said. “You wouldn’t know that looking at her, she looks like any other person, but I understand that she’s really good at rock climbing and has really good balance. She can do a headstand on a surfboard while surfing, which is what I heard. She’s one of those extraordinary people in an ordinary package. She’s very adept.”

Keenan said Koch is a wonderful human being and “super outgoing.”

When he came back to the U.S., he bought a house in Livingston, and Koch did as well around the same time, and she settled quickly into the area.

“She got to know the rest of the Yellowstone community through me, and I always joke she stole all my friends,” Keenan said.

And she has maintained those friendships, as demonstrated by a contingent that traveled to Cape Canaveral last week to watch the launch and attend an “après-launch” party in the region hosted by Koch’s family and friends, Woods said. Keenan was there, too.

Woods attended the launch from a popular viewing site near Cape Canaveral. He described the scene, as he said he told other news outlets, as a “cross between a Taylor Swift concert and a Star Trek convention.”

“Everyone was kind to each other, talking to each other,” Woods said. “Everybody was really nerding out.”

The après-launch party included the Yellowstone contingent as well as the South Pole and astronaut contingents, Keenan said.

“The amount of admiration from her fellow astronauts who flew missions with her, like the two International Space Station missions, the admiration and respect they have for her is very telling amongst that group of people,” Keenan said. “She’s a very special person.”

The Artemis crew returned to Earth on Friday on a hazardous re-entry process.

“When they’re safely at home I will breathe a big sigh of relief,” Keenan told the Enterprise before the safe landing.