Paolo Nespoli

Paolo Nespoli, a charismatic Italian aerospace engineer, joined the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1991 and was selected as astronaut in 1998. He trained in Houston and Moscow before being assigned to his first mission: STS-120 on Space Shuttle Discovery. Two more missions followed in 2010 and 2017, this time long duration on Soyuz/ISS, for a grand total of 313 days in space. During all his space missions, Nespoli took more than half a million pictures. In 2018 he retired from ESA after 27 years of service, and currently continues an important career as speaker all over the world.