Ulf Merbold
Ulf Merbold was born in Greiz, Thuringia, Germany on June 20th, 1941 and is the Astronaut. At the age of 83, Ulf Merbold biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Dr.
Ulf Dietrich Merbold (born June 20, 1941) is the first West German citizen and second German native (after Sigmund Jähn) to have flown in space.
He is also the first member of the European Space Agency Astronaut Corps to participate in a spaceflight mission and the first non-US citizen to reach orbit in a US spacecraft.
In 1983, he and Byron Lichtenberg became the first Payload Specialists to fly on the Space Shuttle.
Early life and education
Ulf Merbold was born in Greiz, in the Vogtland area of Thuringia, Germany, on June 20, 1941. He was the only child of two teachers who lived in the school building of Wellsdorf, a small village. During World War II, his father Herbert Merbold was a soldier who was imprisoned and then released from an American prisoner of war camp in 1945, then soon after was imprisoned by the Red Army in NKVD special camp Nr. 2, where he died on February 23, 1948. Merbold's mother Hildegard Merbold was dismissed from her school by the Soviet zone authorities in 1945. She and her son moved to a house in a suburb of Greiz, where Merbold grew up close to his maternal grandparents and his parental grandfather.
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, however, he was not allowed to study in East Germany so he decided to go to Berlin, crossing into West Berlin by bicycle. He obtained an additional West German high school diploma (Abitur) in 1961, as West German universities didn't 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 August 13, 1961, it became impossible for his mother to visit him. 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. Thanks to an amnesty for people who had left East Germany, Merbold could again see his mother from late December 1964. 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. 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.
Personal life
Ulf Merbold is married to Birgit, née Riester, and the couple have two children, a daughter born in 1975 and a son born in 1979.
In 1984, Merbold met the East-German cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, who had become the first German in space after launching on August 26, 1978, on Soyuz 31. They both were born in the Vogtland (Jähn was born in Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz) and grew up in East Germany. Jähn and Merbold became founding members of the Association of Space Explorers in 1985. Jähn helped Merbold's mother, who had moved to Stuttgart, West Germany, to obtain a permit for a vacation in East Germany. After German reunification, Merbold helped Jähn become a freelance consultant for the German Aerospace Center. At the time of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, they were at an astronaut conference in Saudi Arabia together.
In his spare time Merbold enjoys playing the piano and skiing. He also likes to fly planes including gliders. Holding a commercial pilot license, he has over 3,000 hours of flight experience as a pilot. On his 79th birthday, he inaugurated the new runway at the Flugplatz Greiz-Obergrochlitz airfield, landing with his wife in a Piper Seneca II.
Later career
Merbold became the head of the European Astronaut Center in Cologne's astronaut department in January 1995, just after the Euromir mission. Merbold worked in the ESA Directorate of Manned Spaceflight and Microgravity in Noordwijk, where his job was to spread knowledge of the ISS's capabilities among European research and industry companies. On July 30, 2004, he resigned but he has continued to do consulting work for ESA and give lectures.