He clocked more than 800 hours in space during four space shuttle flights, including more than 29 hours of extravehicular activity. He was responsible for the space probe Ulysses during the October 1990 flight of Discovery that deployed it, flew on the first flight of Endeavour in May 1992, helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope from Endeavour in December 1993, and was the flight engineer when Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir in September 1996.

Akers was selected as an astronaut in 1987, later becoming the assistant director (technical) of the Johnson Space Center. He left NASA in 1997.