JAXA Career
Wakata was selected by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) (now JAXA) as an astronaut candidate in 1992, and trained at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Wakata has held a number of assignments, and during STS-85, Wakata acted as NASDA Assistant Payload Operations Director for the Manipulator Flight Demonstration, a robotic arm experiment for the Japanese Experiment Module of the International Space Station (ISS). In December 2000, he became a NASA robotics instructor astronaut. In July 2006, he served as the commander of the 10th NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission, a seven-day undersea expedition at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquarius laboratory located off the coast of Florida. In August 2006, he started flight engineer training for Russian Soyuz spacecraft in preparation for a long duration stay on the ISS.
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