and chief of the Astronaut Safety Branch. He piloted the space shuttle Discovery's final docking mission with the Russian space station Mir in June 1998. He was pilot of the radar topography mission undertaken by Endeavour in February 2000, which mapped more than 75 million sq km of the Earth's surface. He flew Endeavour in December 2001 to the International Space Station to exchange the resident crews. Gorie served as the crew commander on STS-108 in 2001 and STS-123 missions in 2008. He was selected as an astronaut in 1994 and retired from NASA in 2010.