John Koenig is a fictional character from the television series Space: 1999. He was played by Martin Landau. He is American, apparently in his early forties.

Character Biography

John Koenig is the ninth and last Commander of Moonbase Alpha. Koenig served as Moonbase's Commander in both seasons of the series, and he is a focal point of most of the episodes in both seasons.

He was orphaned in his teens and had no siblings or other close family. He was a child of the Space Age and fascinated by the American Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, and thus set his goal to join NASA and the space programme. He studied astrophysics and engineering at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At university, he met professor of astrophysics Victor Bergman and the two formed a close friendship.

In the astronaut training programme, he was close friends with fellow cadets Sam and Tessa. One of the significant events of his life came when he was assigned to a resupply mission to the Venus space station. Before docking, the space craft received a computer diagnosis that a disease of unknown origin had broken out on the station. Fourteen men were afflicted and three had died. Koenig's commanding officer made the decision to abandon the facility and its personnel as an unknown disease of alien origin could decimate the human race if brought back to Earth. This event seared into Koenig's psyche that a commander often was called upon to make the hard decisions, sacrificing a few in favor of the greater good. This event also carried personal pain as fellow cadets Sam and Tessa, who were to be married soon, had been deployed in a scout craft to rendezvous with the station ahead of the supply ship. They, too, were left to die with the others. Koenig would carry the guilt of this action with him for years until forced to confront it by the psychic-power-amplifying entity in "The Lambda Factor".

John Koenig (born September 24, 1958) is an American diplomat and the United States Ambassador to Cyprus. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 2, 2012. Sworn in on August 17, 2012, Koenig presented his credentials to Cypriot president Demetris Christofias on September 12, 2012.

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