Michael Scott "Mike" Hopkins (born December 28, 1968) is a United States Space Force colonel[1] and a former NASA astronaut.

While there, he played defensive back for the Illinois Fighting Illini football team and was awarded the Big Ten Medal of Honor, which recognizes one male and one female student from the graduating class of each Big Ten member school, for demonstrating joint athletic and academic excellence throughout their college career.

He followed his undergraduate studies with a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University, which he earned in 1992.

He began training alongside his Group mates and five international mission specialists later that year at the Johnson Space Center.

He began training alongside Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazansky for a long-duration flight to the Space Station.

[13] Following the departure of Soyuz TMA-09M, carrying Yurchikin, Nyberg, and Parmitano, Hopkins and his two crewmates joined the Expedition 38 crew, with Kotov taking over as Station commander.

Just prior to the departure of Soyuz TMA-09M, they had been joined by the remaining three Expedition 38 crew members: Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin; NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio; and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, who had arrived aboard Soyuz TMA-11M.

[5][1] On January 27, 2021, Hopkins' third spacewalk was a team effort with Victor Glover, lasting for nearly seven hours as they worked to upgrade the Columbus module.

[19] On February 1, 2021, on the second spacewalk of the mission, and his fourth spacewalk overall, also with Glover, Hopkins replaced a broken external camera, upgraded two other cameras, and concluded a four-year campaign initiated by Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson on Expedition 50 to replace the station's batteries.

[22] In Sept 2024, Hopkins appeared as a commentator during SpaceX's live coverage of the Polaris Dawn spacewalk.

[6] This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.