Mark Charles Lee USAF Colonel, (born August 14, 1952) is a former NASA astronaut who flew on four Space Shuttle missions.

In 1979, after this assignment, he studied for a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he specialized in graphite/epoxy advanced composite materials.

After graduation from MIT in 1980, he was assigned to Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, in the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) Program Office, as the operational support manager.

In June 1985, he completed a one-year training and evaluation program, qualifying him for assignment as a mission specialist on future Space Shuttle flight crews.

His technical responsibilities within the Astronaut Office included extravehicular activity (EVA), the Inertial Upper Stage, Spacelab, and Space Station systems.

In total, during his four space flights, Lee traveled over 13 million miles going around the world 517 times and spending 33 days in orbit.

In his second flight, mission STS-47, running from September 12–20, 1992, Lee was payload commander with overall crew responsibility for the planning, integration, and on-orbit coordination of payload/Space Shuttle activities.

This cooperative mission between the United States and Japan included 44 Japanese and U.S. life science and materials processing experiments and the shuttle carried Spacelab-J.

During this flight, he logged 6 hours and 51 minutes of EVA to test a self-rescue jetpack, undertook the first untethered spacewalk in 10 years and deployed and retrieved a solar science satellite.