We turn 50! 🎉 Meet some of the brilliant people behind half a century of missions, discoveries, and innovation. Roy Gibson was our very first Director General. Born in 1924, he led the Agency from its foundation in 1975 until 1980. Ulf Merbold was our first astronaut to fly in space, as part of the crew of the STS-9 Spacelab 1 mission on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1983. Claudie Haigneré made history in 2001 as the first female European astronaut on a ‘taxi flight’ to the International Space Stat

On April 29, 1985, the European Space Agency's Spacelab launched on the space shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51B. This was the second time the Spacelab went to space and the first time it flew in a fully operational configuration. Spacelab pallets had flown to space on three previous shuttle missions, but this was the first time that the entire laboratory was used to conduct research in microgravity. Spacelab provided a platform for five fields of research: astronomy, atmospheric physics, mat