Edward Michael "Mike" Fincke (born March 14, 1967) is an American astronaut and retired United States Air Force colonel.

He formerly held the American record for the most time in space (381.6 days) until it was broken by Scott Kelly on October 16, 2015.

[2] Immediately after graduating from MIT in 1989, Fincke attended a summer exchange program with the Moscow Aviation Institute in the former Soviet Union, now Russia, where he studied Cosmonautics.

Having completed two years of training and evaluation, he was assigned technical duties in the Astronaut Office Station Operations Branch serving as an International Space Station spacecraft communicator (ISS CAPCOM), a member of the Crew Test Support Team in Russia and as the ISS crew procedures team lead.

Additionally he served as a backup for the ISS Expedition 6 crew and is qualified to fly as a left-seat flight engineer (co-pilot) on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

[2] In 2013, Fincke served as cavenaut into the ESA CAVES[3] training in Sardinia, alongside Soichi Noguchi, Andreas Mogensen, Nikolai Tikhonov, Andrew Feustel and David Saint-Jacques.

Fincke was the space station science officer and flight engineer for ISS Expedition 9 from April 18 through October 23, 2004.

Expedition 9 was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz TMA-4 spacecraft, and docked with the International Space Station on April 21, 2004.

On September 30, 2022, NASA announced that Fincke would fly as the pilot on the Starliner's first operational mission, Boeing Starliner-1 (PCM-1).

[6] Fincke has been certified as a co-pilot/flight engineer for the Soyuz spacecraft, a member of the Space Shuttle flight deck crew, and a pilot for Starliner.

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