Norishige Kanai (born December 5, 1976, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese medical doctor and astronaut who began a stay of about six months at the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2017. (See also space exploration.)
Kanai was born in Tokyo but was raised in nearby Chiba. He graduated from the National Defense Medical College, a military academy in Tokorozawa, in 2002. For the next few years, Kanai worked as a surgeon in military hospitals. In 2004 he received diving medical officer training, in which he learned about diving-related illnesses and injuries. He then trained with the U.S. Navy at the U.S. Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City Beach, Florida. There he learned that many American astronauts had backgrounds in diving and medicine, like himself, and thus he was inspired to become an astronaut. In 2006 he qualified as a navy diver.
In 2009 the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) selected Kanai for the astronaut program. He trained for two years with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States. Most of his training took place at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kanai learned about the ISS systems, robotics, space walking, and other technical and scientific topics.
In 2015 Kanai lived for 14 days in the undersea Aquarius habitat off the coast of Florida. It was part of the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project. The habitat and the surrounding ocean simulate the environment of space. The crew performed tasks that were useful in space. For part of the mission, the NEEMO crew communicated with the surface on delays of 5 and 10 minutes to simulate missions to nearby asteroids and Mars, respectively.
Later in 2015 JAXA appointed Kanai a flight engineer and assigned him to a future expedition. In 2017 he was part of a three-member crew along with Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov and American astronaut Scott Tingle that traveled to the ISS in the Russian Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft. Kanai caused a stir early in his mission when he tweeted that he had grown 9 cm (3.5 inches) in orbit. However, Shkaplerov, a veteran of two previous spaceflights, was skeptical because, although astronauts typically grow a few centimetres, they never grow as many as 9 cm. Kanai remeasured his height and found that he had made a mistake; he had grown only 2 cm (0.8 inches). During his time at the ISS, he participated in a space walk that lasted six hours with American astronaut Mark Vande Hei to upgrade and move equipment on the space station’s exterior.