Paolo Nespoli

Paolo Nespoli is the jack-of-all-trades in the European astronaut corps. He’s mastered flying, diving, parachuting, and more. Trained as an engineer, he served as a parachute instructor in the Italian army before becoming an astronaut.

Paolo flew to space three times. In 2007, aboard the space shuttle Discovery, he delivered a brand-new module to the ISS. He returned twice more on the Russian Soyuz capsule.

His missions were packed with highlights. Paolo docked cargo ships like the European ATV and Japanese HTV to the ISS, filmed several documentaries, and captured a legendary photo of the ISS with a space shuttle attached while departing on his Soyuz.

Did you know this about Paolo?

• He is a fan of Italian football club Inter Milan.

• His hobbies include scuba diving, flying, photography and computers.

• Paolo filmed segments for the documentary First Orbit, aiming to recreate, as accurately as possible, the view that Yuri Gagarin—the first astronaut—experienced during his historic journey into space

• He worked with students on Earth. They were allowed to programme a Raspberry Pi computer that was on board the space station.

• Paolo was the first astronaut to contribute to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia from space.

• In total, he was in space for 313 days, 2 hours and 36 minutes.