Kenneth Lafferty Hess
- Status: Occasional Spaceflight
- In Space: No
- Date of Birth: 01/22/1953
- First Flight: 05/19/2024
- Last Flight: 05/19/2024
Launches
Kenneth Lafferty Hess, a American astronaut affiliated with the private agency Blue Origin, embarked on 1 space flights and engaging in 0 spacewalks during his/her career as an astronaut.
Ken is a software engineer and entrepreneur who shaped today’s technology-based family history industry when he developed the Family Tree Maker product line in the 1990s. The company was acquired by Ancestry.com in 2003. In 2001, Ken gave back by founding Science Buddies, a K-12 nonprofit created to level the playing field and improve STEM literacy by inspiring students through free, personalized, hands-on projects in all areas of science, including space exploration. Science Buddies has reached one-quarter billion users. Ken’s lifelong passion for space exploration is in his DNA, with numerous early American pioneers in his mother’s lineage and many engineers and technicians in his father’s.
