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Meet ‘Astro Terry’ Virts, America’s next big space star

By Elahe Izadi
November 11, 2014
By Elahe Izadi
November 11, 2014
NASA astronaut Terry Virts at a training session in Star City, outside Moscow on Oct. 31. (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA)
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NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman's return to Earth means that humanity is without a social media guru in space. But fear not, for soon another American astronaut, Terry Virts, will make the journey to the cosmos, and from the looks of it, his social media game is strong.

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Wiseman (aka @Astro_Reid) spent more than five months on the International Space Station conducting research and helping to care for the station — oh, and taking amazing selfies and epic landscape shots. He became the Internet's space darling. Wiseman even tookthe first space Vine!

He returned Sunday with German Alexander Gerst (aka @Astro_Alex, a pretty decent social media space guy himself) and Russian commander Maxim Suraev.

Virts blasts off for the ISS on Nov. 23 and will be aboard the space station for more than five months. He will conduct at least two spacewalks during that time, according to NASA, while also helping to support hundreds of experiments in the station's laboratory.

But before he departs our planet, Virts has been in Russia training with his crew-mates -- an astronaut from the European Space Agency and another from the Russian Federal Space Agency. Virts, aka @AstroTerry, has been tweeting and 'gramming photos of his final weeks on Earth, which leads us to expect great things from him once he begins his orbit.

Virts hails from Columbia, Md., and is an Air Force Colonel who went on to become an astronaut in 2000. He piloted space shuttle Endeavor during a 13-day mission in 2010.

Oh, and he's a fan of horses. "I think the odds are 100 percent that we're going to be watching the Kentucky Derby from space," Virts told Louisville Fox affiliate WDRB.

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