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Chinese-American on International Space Station Mission
When astronaut Edward Lu stepped into space to work on the International Space Station Monday, he became the third ethnic Chinese scientist to go into space. Lu and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko spent more than six hours in space working on the permanent space station.
Edward Lu's father Charlie Lu graduated from Guangxi University. In 1948, his company China Petroleum Company sent him to Taiwan. And in the 1950s, he immigrated to America where he worked as a chemical engineer.
Edward Lu's mother Snowlily Lu is the daughter of a dean of China's Northeastern University during the Sino-Japanese War. After she graduated from Taichung Agricultural Institute in Taiwan, she moved to America and worked as a computer programmer.
Edward Lu was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1963 and grew up in the United States. He considers Honolulu, Hawaii and Webster, New York to be his hometowns. In 1984, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and went on to Stanford to received a doctorate in applied physics in 1989. Since obtaining his Ph.D., Dr. Lu has been doing research in the fields of solar physics and astrophysics in Colorado and Hawaii.
Dr. Lu spent two months in Taiwan studying Chinese. In addition to Chinese, he took a crash course in Russian before going up to space for the first time in 1997.
Dr. Lu was selected by NASA in 1994. He has completed a year of training and is a qualified mission specialist. He served as a mission specialist on NASA's sixth shuttle mission to rendezvous and dock with the Russian Space Station Mir in May 1997.
The first ethnic Chinese scientist to go into space was Taylor Wang, a payload specialist on the Challenger space shuttle in April 1985. Cleave Chang-Diaz, an ethnic Chinese born in Costa Rica, became the second to go into space and by 1998, he had been to space six times.
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