On a recent night in her hometown of Copake Falls, Imelda Muller found herself awake at 3 a.m. She stepped out onto her parents’ deck, where the Hudson Valley sky was so dark that the Milky Way shimmered like a river of light. Her mother happened to be outside too. Without a word, the two of them stood together, gazing upward.
“It still amazes me how brilliant the sky is from there,” Muller said in a recent interview with the Herald. “I think that just feeling almost overwhelmed with how large the universe is, and really inspired by the potential to explore out there, is something that I have felt since I was a little kid. And that definitely started at home.”
Now 34, Muller is preparing to pursue that horizon more literally. This month, NASA selected her for a two-year training program that could culminate in a title that captures her relentless drive to test the edges of human intelligence and ingenuity: astronaut.
Muller was born in Mineola, N.Y., but grew up in Copake Falls, in Columbia County, where her parents, Philip and Imelda, still live. She graduated from Taconic Hills High School in 2009, where she was the kind of student who filled her schedule with everything she could — drama, sports, and advanced science courses. “We come from a small area, small towns, so we had the fortune to be involved in a lot of things,” she recalled. “My coaches and my teachers, they always just kind of instilled the values of working really hard. And I think that has carried me through my professional career.”
That ethic took her first to Northeastern University, where she earned a degree in behavioral neuroscience in 2012, then to the University of Vermont College of Medicine, where she graduated in 2017. She completed her anesthesia residency at Johns Hopkins this summer, just before reporting for duty in Houston.
Her path to space, however, ran through the depths of the ocean. After medical school, Muller commissioned into the U.S. Navy and became an undersea medical officer. At the Navy Experimental Diving Unit in Florida, she studied decompression safety, resilience under pressure, and saturation diving — high-risk work that demanded both scientific rigor and personal endurance. She later supported Navy training operations at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, where astronauts rehearse spacewalks underwater.
It was there, she said, that the parallels between diving and space clicked into place. “In trying to get people to explore the depths of the ocean, we were facing analogous challenges as we do today in exploring space,” Muller said. “Working with multidisciplinary teams, being driven to explore and driven by innovation — that was very tangible at NASA. I realized at that point, Hey, I really want to give this a shot and try to be an astronaut.”
The astronaut candidate class Muller joins in Houston is the first since 2021. Over the next two years, she and her classmates will train in spacecraft systems, robotics, Russian language, survival skills, and spacewalking. For now, she is officially an ASCAN — shorthand for astronaut candidate. “At the end of this two-year process, we’re considered astronauts,” she explained. “After that, it really depends on the needs of our mission and suitability for that particular mission. We’re happy to support in whatever way our background can make that happen.”
Her timing could prove propitious. NASA is deep into preparations for the Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon later this decade as a step toward human missions to Mars. “We’re very focused right now on getting to the moon,” Muller said. “And we know that our work in discovery and in innovation and in technology with getting to the moon is ultimately going to help us to get to Mars. Being any part of that team — whether I fly myself or support my crew members who are flying — that’s definitely something that drives me.”
For Muller, the appeal of space is not just about destinations but about testing the outer edge of possibility. “We’re constantly learning about how far we can go as humanity,” she said. “Some things are physical limitations, some are cognitive, and some are just limits that we put on ourselves. We know that we can break through a lot of that to overcome the challenges we need to in order to pursue exploration on the moon and on Mars.”
Her résumé already suggests she thrives at those edges. She was an elite triathlete with the U.S. Military Endurance Sports team, earned the Pentagon’s Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientists and Engineers of the Year Award, and received the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal twice for her work in diving medicine.
For all her accomplishments, Muller still frames her journey in terms familiar to the young people of her hometown, where she once watched the night sky and imagined other worlds. Asked what she would say to children doing the same, she paused, then said: “The sky is no longer the limit. It’s time to think big. That can mean just working hard at whatever challenge they have to overcome that day. And when you do that day after day, it really adds up. You can be surprised at what you might be able to achieve, especially with the right team.”