Franz Viehböck

Franz Artur Viehböck was born in 1960 in Vienna and trained as an electrical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, where he was working when Austria decided, in the closing years of the Cold War, to buy itself a seat to space. The Soviet-Austrian project Austromir 91 drew more than 200 Austrian applicants; Viehböck and physician Clemens Lothaller were chosen for cosmonaut training at Star City near Moscow, with Viehböck ultimately designated the prime crew member. A capable linguist who spoke German, Russian, English, French, and Spanish, he adapted to the demanding Soviet training regime and prepared to carry a modest but serious scientific payload developed by Austrian institutions.

On 2 October 1991, Viehböck launched aboard Soyuz TM-13 alongside Soviet commander Alexander Volkov and Kazakh cosmonaut Toktar Aubakirov — a single flight that produced the first spacefarers of both Austria and Kazakhstan. Two days later the spacecraft docked with the Mir space station, and Viehböck settled into a roughly eight-day visit, conducting about 15 experiments in space medicine, physics, and space technology together with the resident Mir crew of Anatoly Artsebarsky and Sergei Krikalev. The research ranged across human physiology in microgravity to materials-science instruments studying how spaceflight alters materials. In one of the more human footnotes of the mission, his wife gave birth to their daughter in a hospital in Wiener Neustadt roughly eight and a half hours after his liftoff. Because Austromir was a visiting flight, Viehböck returned to Earth on the earlier Soyuz TM-12 capsule on 10 October 1991, having logged about 190 hours in space and never having performed a spacewalk.

Viehböck remains the first and, to date, only Austrian to have flown in space. He was honored with the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art and the Russian Order of Friendship of Peoples, recognition of a flight that was as much a diplomatic and industrial bridge between Vienna and Moscow as a scientific one. Now retired from spaceflight, he moved into the aerospace industry, where he applied his engineering background to the commercial side of the field. His mission stands as a distinctly Austrian chapter in the history of the Mir era — a single, meticulously prepared visit that carried a small country's science into orbit and gave it a permanent place among the roughly three dozen nations that have sent one of their own beyond the atmosphere.