Ulf Merbold

Ulf Dietrich Merbold (born 20 June 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.

Merbold flew on two Space Shuttle missions and on a Russian mission to the space station Mir, spending a total of 49 days in space.

Ulf Merbold was born in Greiz, in the Vogtland area of Thuringia, on 20 June 1941.

He was the only child of two teachers who lived in the school building of Wellsdorf, a small village.

Merbold's father was imprisoned in NKVD special camp Nr. 2 by the Red Army in 1945 and died there in 1948, and Merbold was brought up in the town of Greiz in East Germany by his mother and grandparents.

During World War II, Ulf's father Herbert Merbold was a soldier who was imprisoned and then released from an American prisoner of war camp in 1945.

Merbold's mother Hildegard was dismissed from her school by the Soviet zone authorities in 1945.

She and her son moved to a house in Kurtschau, a suburb of Greiz, where Merbold grew up close to his maternal grandparents and his paternal grandfather.

Soon after, he was imprisoned by the Red Army in NKVD special camp Nr. 2, where he died on 23 February 1948.

As he was not allowed to attend university in East Germany, he left for West Berlin in 1960, planning to study physics there.

After graduating in 1960 from Theodor-Neubauer-Oberschule high school—now Ulf-Merbold-Gymnasium Greiz—in Greiz, Merbold wanted to study physics at the University of Jena.

Because he had not joined the Free German Youth, the youth organization of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, he was not allowed to study in East Germany so he decided to go to Berlin, and crossed into West Berlin by bicycle.

After the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he moved to Stuttgart, West Germany.

He obtained a West German high school diploma (Abitur) in 1961, as West German universities did not accept the East German one, and intended to start studying in Berlin so he could occasionally see his mother.

When the Berlin Wall was built on 13 August 1961, it became impossible for Ulf's mother to visit him.

Thanks to an amnesty for people who had left East Germany, Merbold could again see his mother from late December 1964.

In 1968, he graduated from the University of Stuttgart with a diploma in physics, and in 1976 he gained a doctorate with a dissertation about the effect of radiation on iron.

He then joined the staff at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research.

Merbold then moved to Stuttgart, where he had an aunt, and started studying physics at the University of Stuttgart, graduating with a Diplom in 1968.

He lived in a dormitory in a wing of Solitude Palace.

After completing his doctorate, Merbold became a staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, where he had held a scholarship from 1968.

At the institute, he worked on solid-state and low-temperature physics, with a special focus on experiments regarding lattice defects in body-centered cubic (bcc) materials.

In 1973, NASA and the European Space Research Organisation, a precursor organization of the European Space Agency (ESA), agreed to build a scientific laboratory that would be carried on the Space Shuttle, then under development.

The memorandum of understanding contained the suggestion the first flight of Spacelab should have a European crew member on board.

The West German contribution to Spacelab was 53.3% of the cost; 52.6% of the work contracts were carried out by West German companies, including the main contractor ERNO.

In 1976, Merbold obtained a doctorate in natural sciences, also from the University of Stuttgart, with a dissertation titled Untersuchung der Strahlenschädigung von stickstoffdotierten Eisen nach Neutronenbestrahlung bei 140 Grad Celsius mit Hilfe von Restwiderstandsmessungen on the effects of neutron radiation on nitrogen-doped iron.

In 1977, Merbold successfully applied to the European Space Agency (ESA) to become one of their first astronauts.

In March 1977, ESA issued an Announcement of Opportunity for future astronauts, and several thousand people applied.

He started astronaut training with NASA in 1978.

In 1983, Merbold flew to space for the first time as a payload specialist or science astronaut on the first Spacelab mission, STS-9, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia.

He performed experiments in materials science and on the effects of microgravity on humans.

In 1989, Merbold was selected as payload specialist for the International Microgravity Laboratory-1 (IML-1) Spacelab mission STS-42, which launched in January 1992 on the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Again, he mainly performed experiments in life sciences and materials science in microgravity.

After ESA decided to cooperate with Russia, Merbold was chosen as one of the astronauts for the joint ESA–Russian Euromir missions and received training at the Russian Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

For the second German Spacelab mission D-2 in 1993, Merbold served as science coordinator.

Merbold's responsibilities for ESA included work at the European Space Research and Technology Centre on the Columbus program and service as head of the German Aerospace Center's astronaut office.

He 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, Merbold provided ground-based support for other ESA missions.

For the German Spacelab mission Spacelab D-1, he served as backup astronaut and as crew interface coordinator.

He continued working for ESA until his retirement in 2004.