Reinhold Ewald portrait

ESA astronaut Reinhold Ewald, from Germany, poses in front of a model of the International Space Station (ISS). A research scientist with the University of Cologne, Reinhold Ewald joined DLR (German Aerospace Centre) in 1987 and managed several projects in extraterrestrial science before becoming the coordinator for spaceflight in DLR's planning department. In 1990 he joined the German national astronaut team and took up training as back-up astronaut for the German-Russian MIR'92 mission (March 17 to 25, 1992) at the Cosmonaut Training Centre (TsPK) in Star City, Russia. After the mission, he returned to Germany as the Deputy Head of DLR's Astronaut Office and supported the Spacelab D-2 mission onboard NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-55, April 26 to May 6, 1993). Reinhold Ewald flew as a research cosmonaut on the Russian Soyuz TM-25 vehicle and spent 18 days on board the Mir Space Station for the German-Russian MIR'97 mission (February 10 to March 2, 1997). In February 1999 he joined ESA's European Astronaut Corps at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany, and has been the Crew Operations Manager for the two Soyuz Taxi missions with ESA astronauts to the ISS in 2002 (Marco Polo and Odissea), and ESA's Operations Manager for the Cervantes (October 18 to 28, 2003) and DELTA (April 19 to 30, 2004) missions.