Portal:United States Coast Guard/Selected biography/4

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Daniel C. Burbank (born 27 July 1961) is an American astronaut and a veteran of two space shuttle missions. Burbank, a Captain in the United States Coast Guard, is the second Coast Guard astronaut (the first was Bruce Melnick).

Burbank, born in Manchester, Connecticut and raised in Tolland, Connecticut, where he graduated from Tolland High School. He attended the United States Coast Guard Academy, earning his commission in 1985. In 1987, he went through flight training and became an instructor pilot, serving at various Coast Guard stations in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Sitka, Alaska. NASA selected him as an astronaut candidate in 1996 and flew as a mission specialist aboard STS-106 in 2000. He was a mission specialist on STS-115, which launched on September 9, 2006 and returned to Earth on September 21, 2006. Burbank made his first spacewalk on September 13, during a 7 hour EVA to activate the solar panels on the International Space Station's new P3/4 truss.