Selected by NASA in 1984, Mark Lee completed his training in 1985 and took on various technical roles, including extravehicular activity (EVA) and Space Station systems. Lee served as a spacecraft communicator (CAPCOM) and held several leadership positions within the Astronaut Office.

Lee’s space career includes four missions, traveling over 13 million miles and orbiting Earth 517 times. He flew as a mission specialist on STS-30, where he helped deploy the Magellan Venus-exploration spacecraft, the first U.S. planetary science mission launched since 1978. On STS-47, he served as Payload Commander, overseeing 44 Japanese and U.S. life science and materials processing experiments.

During STS-64, he performed the first untethered spacewalk in a decade, logging 6 hours and 51 minutes of EVA. His final mission, STS-82, was the second Hubble Space Telescope maintenance mission, where he conducted three spacewalks totaling 19 hours and 10 minutes, installing new spectrometers and replacement instruments, and upgrading the telescope’s insulation.

Lee retired from NASA and the Air Force July 1, 2001.