U.S. Naval War College Holds Discussion With NASA Astronauts Aboard International Space Station

The U.S. Naval War College (NWC) held a live discussion with NASA astronauts Christopher Williams and U.S. Navy Capt. Jack Hathaway aboard the International Space Station 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, on Friday, April 24, 2026.

The event was moderated by National Security Affairs Associate Prof. Dr. David Burbach, director of the war college’s Space Studies Group, and included a subsequent in-person discussion with NASA engineer Grier Wilt. Wilt – who has served as a Spacewalk Task Flight Controller, Astronaut Instructor and Capsule Communicator at Mission Control – most recently worked as Flight Operations Lead for the Artemis Pressurized Rover, helping shape how astronauts can live and work on the moon in the future.

Hathaway, a Navy fighter pilot, is a 2015 war college graduate and alumnus of the Halsey Alfa Advanced Research Program.

“The Naval War College is helping people think with a wider perspective, to take the knowledge that they’ve gained in their tactical communities and learn about the operational and strategic levels of war,” said Hathaway.

He told students, faculty and staff in attendance in the war college’s Spruance Auditorium that the war college curriculum is “very applicable to our experience here at the International Space Station and in human space exploration writ large.”

Hathaway said the war college teaches students to understand how to leverage different specialties, backgrounds, skill sets and approaches to work as part of a dynamic team to accomplish a mission.

That’s similar to the astronaut experience, he said, in which the men and women aboard the space station must coordinate with a ground support team and specialists at control centers around the world to solve problems in an extreme extraterrestrial environment.

“We’re an international partnership that’s trying to accomplish this incredibly complex task (in space),” he said, “and being able to take from that larger perspective, while we all have these shared simultaneous goals, is something that you teach at the war college.”

Hathaway and Williams told the NWC audience that the work they’re doing aboard the space station is advancing prospects for future moon missions. Prior to the call with the war college, Williams was working on building a space-deployable exercise device and planting alfalfa as a potential food source for astronauts, for instance.

Before becoming an astronaut, Williams was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he worked as a medical physicist in the Radiation Oncology Department at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Hathaway and Williams were both in the 2021 Astronaut Candidate Class, which also included NWC graduate Lt. Cmdr. Jessica Wittner.

Other noteworthy NWC alumni in space include astronauts Alan Shepard, Charles Precourt and Jeff Williams. Shepard, a 1957 graduate, became the first American in space in 1961 and commanded the Apollo 14 mission landing on the moon a decade later.

Precourt, a 1990 graduate and U.S. Air Force officer, became the chief of NASA’s Astronaut Corps and received the NWC Distinguished Graduate Leadership Award (DGLA) in 2002. Williams, a 1996 graduate and U.S. Army officer, is credited with four ISS missions adding up to more than 500 days in space.

The NWC Space Studies Group was established just more than one year ago as the college ramps up offerings in the subject matter – current electives include classes on space weather effects on military operations, space technology and missions, and Burbach’s class on space and national power.

Founded in 1884, NWC informs today’s decision-makers and educates tomorrow’s leaders by providing educational experiences and learning opportunities that develop their ability to anticipate and prepare strategically for the future, strengthen the foundations of peace, and create a decisive warfighting advantage.