William Shepherd
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- There was also a Member of Parliament by the same name, see William Shepherd
William M. Shepherd (born July 26 1949) is an American astronaut who served as commander of the Expedition One crew on the International Space Station.
Shepherd was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1971 with a degree in aerospace engineering. After basic training, he became a Navy SEAL. Later he obtained postgraduate degrees in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Shepherd was selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 1984. In 1986 his Navy SEAL training proved unexpectedly useful to NASA as he participated in salvage operations of the Space Shuttle Challenger after its destruction. Shepherd then served as a mission specialist on three space shuttle flights: mission STS-27 in 1988, mission STS-41 which deployed the Ulysses probe in 1990 and mission STS-52 in 1992.
In 1993, Shepherd was assigned to program management for the International Space Station. From October 31, 2000, to March 21, 2001, he and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergey Krikalev served as the first crew stationed at the ISS in Expedition 1.
Shepherd was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 2003.nl:William Shepherd