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.

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

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.

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.

[7][8][9] She and her son moved to a house in Kurtschau [de],[10] a suburb of Greiz, where Merbold grew up close to his maternal grandparents and his paternal grandfather.

[11] In 1976, Merbold obtained a doctorate in natural sciences, also from the University of Stuttgart,[1] 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.

[18] 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.

[8] At the institute, he worked on solid-state and low-temperature physics,[15] with a special focus on experiments regarding lattice defects in body-centered cubic (bcc) materials.

[23] Fifty-three of these underwent an interview and assessment process that started in September 1977, and considered their skills in science and engineering as well as their physical health.

[24] Four of the applicants were chosen as ESA astronauts; these were Merbold, Italian Franco Malerba, Swiss Claude Nicollier and Dutch Wubbo Ockels.

[24] In 1978, Merbold, Nicollier and Ockels went to Houston for NASA training at Johnson Space Center while Malerba stayed in Europe.

[32] The payload specialists started their training at Marshall Space Flight Center in August 1978, and then traveled to laboratories in several countries, where they learned the background of the planned experiments and how to operate the experimental equipment.

[33] The mission specialists were Owen Garriott and Robert A. Parker, and the flight crew John Young and Brewster Shaw.

[34] In January 1982, the mission and payload specialists started training at Marshall Space Flight Center on a Spacelab simulator.

[36] Although payload specialists were not supposed to train on the Northrop T-38 Talon jet, Young took Merbold on a flight and allowed him to fly the plane.

[50] The astronauts were subjects of a study on the effects of the environment in orbit on humans;[51] these included experiments aiming to understand space adaptation syndrome, of which three of the four scientific crew members displayed some symptoms.

[57] On one of the last days in orbit, Young, Lichtenberg and Merbold took part in an international, televised press conference that included US president Ronald Reagan in Washington, DC, and the Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl, who was at a European economic summit meeting in Athens, Greece.

[58][59][60] During the telecast, which Reagan described as "one heck of a conference call", Merbold gave a tour of Spacelab and showed Europe from space while mentioning die Schönheit der Erde (the beauty of the Earth).

[65] The four scientific crew members spent the week after landing doing extensive physiological experiments, many of them comparing their post-flight responses to those in microgravity.

[70] In ESA parlance, Merbold and the three other payload specialists—Germans Reinhard Furrer and Ernst Messerschmid and the Dutch Wubbo Ockels—were called "science astronauts" to distinguish them from "passengers" like Saudi prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud and Utah senator Jake Garn, both of whom had also flown as payload specialists on the Space Shuttle.

[1] In June 1989, Ulf Merbold was chosen to train as payload specialist for the International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-1) Spacelab mission.

[76] Originally, Sonny Carter was assigned as one of three mission specialists, he died in a plane crash on 5 April 1991, and was replaced by David C.

[78] IML-1 included ESA's Biorack module,[79] a biological research facility in which cells and small organisms could be exposed to weightlessness and cosmic radiation.

[80] It was used for microgravity experiments on various biological samples including frog eggs, fruit flies, and Physarum polycephalum slime molds.

The aim of this collaboration was to gain experience in long-duration spaceflights, which were not possible with NASA at the time,[84] and to prepare for the construction of the Columbus module of the ISS.

[87] Merbold launched with commander Aleksandr Viktorenko and flight engineer Yelena Kondakova on Soyuz TM-20 on 4 October 1994, 1:42 a.m. Moscow time.

[90] For one experiment designed to study the vestibular system, Merbold wore a helmet that recorded his motion and his eye movements.

[92] Merbold's return flight with Malenchenko and Musabayev on Soyuz TM-19 was delayed by one day to experiment with the automated docking system that had failed on the Progress transporter.

[92] The test was successful and on 4 November, Soyuz TM-19 de-orbited, carrying the three cosmonauts and 16 kg (35 lb) of Merbold's samples from the biological experiments, with the remainder to return later on the Space Shuttle.

[1] On his 79th birthday, he inaugurated the new runway at the Flugplatz Greiz-Obergrochlitz [de] airfield, landing with his wife in a Piper Seneca II.