Ulrich Walter
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Ulrich Walter (born February 9, 1954) is a German astronaut and physicist/engineer.
Walter was born in Iserlohn, West Germany. After finishing secondary school there and two years in the Bundeswehr, he studied physics at the University of Cologne. In 1980 he was awarded a diploma degree, and five years later a doctorate, both in the field of solid state physics.
After two post-doc positions at the Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, Illinois, and the University of California at Berkeley, California, he was selected in 1987 to join the German astronaut team. From 1988-1990 he did basic training at the German DLR, and was then nominated to be in the prime crew for the second German spacelab mission.
In 1993 he flew on board the space shuttle Columbia on the mission STS-55 (Spacelab D-2) as a Payload specialist. On this mission he spent 9 days 23 hours and 40 minutes in space.
After his spaceflight he worked for another four years at DLR, managing a space imaging database project. When the German astronaut team was merged into a European one he did not join, but move to work at IBM Germany.
Since 2003, he is a full professor at the Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany), holding the chair for spacefare technology at the University's faculty of mechanical engineering.
He is author of several books, and does also work as presenter of a popular science magazine show on Bavarian TV.
Ulrich Walter is married and has two children.
External links
- NASA biography (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/walter-u.html)de:Ulrich Walter