Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Ulf Merbold/archive1

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Official portrait for the STS-42 Space Shuttle mission

Ulf Dietrich Merbold (born June 20, 1941) is a German physicist and astronaut who flew to space three times, becoming the first West German citizen in space and the first non-American to fly on a NASA spacecraft. He flew on two Space Shuttle missions and on a Russian mission to the space station Mir, spending a total of 49 days in space. A graduate from the University of Stuttgart, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research. In 1977, he joined the European Space Agency (ESA) to become one of their first astronauts. He flew for the first time on Space Shuttle Columbia, and in 1989 he was selected for the Spacelab mission STS-42, which launched in January 1992 on Discovery. He received training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and flew to space for the third and last time in October 1994, spending a month working on experiments on the Mir space station. Between his space flights, he provided ground support for other ESA missions until his retirement in 2004. (Full article...)