Indian-American Raja Chari has been selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class

Indian-American Raja Chari has been selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class. He has joined the duty in August 2017. The Iowa native graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1999 with Bachelor’s degrees in Astronautical Engineering and Engineering Science. At the time of his selection in June 2017, Chari was a Colonel select in the U.S. #AirForce, serving as the Commander of the 461st Flight Test Squadron and the Director of the F-35 Integrated Test Force. He has accumulated more than 2,000 hours of flight time in the F-35, F-15, F-16, and F-18 including F-15E combat missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom and deployments in support of the Korean peninsula.