Jeffrey Hoffman

Jeffrey Hoffman (born November 2, 1944, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American astronaut and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Having completed five space flights, he was the first astronaut to log 1,000 hours aboard the space shuttle. He was also the first Jewish American man in space. Celebrated for his repair of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, Hoffman was elected into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2007.

Early life and education

Hoffman’s childhood in the New York suburbs was colored by a fascination with science and space. From playing space rangers with friends to taking trips to the Hayden Planetarium with his father, he grew up at the dawn of the space age.

Hoffman graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1962 and received a bachelor’s in astronomy (summa cum laude) from Amherst College in 1966. He completed a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard University in 1971, where he worked on the design, construction, testing, and flight of balloon-borne gamma-ray telescopes.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

In 1972 he moved to England to begin his postdoctoral work at the University of Leicester. There he not only led a medium-energy X-ray experiment on the European Space Agency’s EXOSAT satellite but also met his wife, Barbara Catherine Attridge. They had two sons, Sam and Orin. Jeffrey Hoffman worked as an astronomer throughout the 1970s. In 1988 he received a master’s in materials science from Rice University, about a decade after the space program had begun recruiting scientists, not just fighter pilots, to become astronauts.

Life in space

In 1978 Hoffman was selected as an astronaut to fly on NASA’s space shuttle. He completed five missions between 1985 and 1996.

• Discovery STS-51-D (April 12–19, 1985): A mission specialist, Hoffman made the first unplanned contingency spacewalk.
• Columbia STS-35 (December 2–10, 1990): Hoffman helped conduct the ASTRO-1 ultraviolet astronomy laboratory project he had worked on since 1982.
• Atlantis STS-46 (July 31–August 8, 1992): A payload commander and mission specialist, Hoffman helped deploy the European Retrievable Carrier and conducted the first test flight of the Tethered Satellite System (TSS).
• Endeavour STS-61 (December 2–13, 1993): Hoffman helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope, which he considers the most significant of his achievements.
• Columbia STS-75 (February 22–March 9, 1996): Hoffman became the first astronaut to log 1,000 hours aboard the space shuttle on this mission. He helped perform combustion experiments and refly the TSS.

After his final space flight, Hoffman became NASA’s European representative in Paris.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Space Torah

Like all explorers, astronauts bring their traditions, history, and culture with them to space. In 1996 Hoffman brought a small Torah aboard the Columbia, and on Shabbat he read from the book of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Rooted in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam—the imperative to “repair the world”—Hoffman’s lifework took on a uniquely literal meaning. His celebrated repair of the Hubble Space Telescope stood as a profound orbital reflection of that principle.

MIT professor and legacy

Hoffman joined the MIT faculty in 2001 as a professor of the practice of aerospace engineering in the department of aeronautics and astronautics, where he teaches space systems design, space policy, and space flight technology. With more than 250 publications, he is the director of both the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium and the Man Vehicle Lab. A believer in public-private partnerships in the aerospace industry, he serves as the deputy principal investigator of the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, the first experiment to produce oxygen on the surface of Mars, supporting future human exploration of the Red Planet.