Paolo Nespoli

Paolo Nespoli was born on 6 April 1957 in Milan and grew up in Verano Brianza, and his path to space ran first through the military and then through engineering. Beginning in the late 1970s he served in the Italian Army, qualifying as a parachutist, parachute instructor, and Special Forces operator with the elite 9th Parachute Assault Regiment 'Col Moschin.' He then returned to his studies, earning a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering in 1988 and a master's in aeronautics and astronautics in 1989 from the Polytechnic University of New York. He worked as an engineer supporting astronaut training at the European Astronaut Centre before being selected into the European Astronaut Corps in 1998, joining the astronaut office that would send him to orbit three times.

Nespoli flew three missions across a decade. His first, the Esperia mission, came aboard Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-120, which launched on 23 October 2007; during the roughly two-week flight the crew delivered and installed the Harmony connecting module, and Nespoli served as a mission specialist. His second flight, MagISStra, launched on 15 December 2010 aboard Soyuz TMA-20 with cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev and NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman, and kept him aboard the station for about five months into 2011, during which he became known for his striking photography of Earth and of the station. As he departed the ISS in his Soyuz on 23 May 2011, he took the first-ever pictures of a Space Shuttle docked to the station photographed from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. His third mission, VITA, launched on 28 July 2017 aboard Soyuz MS-05, adding roughly another 139 days in orbit. In total he spent about 313 days in space and supported a broad program of experiments, flying no spacewalks across the three missions.

On his final flight Nespoli was, at 60, the oldest active ESA astronaut, and he retired in 2019 after a career that made him one of Italy's most recognizable spacefarers. Beyond the science, he became an eloquent communicator of the view from orbit, a passionate photographer and storyteller who used his flights to share the fragility and beauty of Earth and to spark curiosity through ESA's education and outreach programs. His achievements were recognized with honours including NASA's Space Flight Medal and appointment as a Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Now retired, he remains a veteran of three spaceflights and a lasting public face of European human spaceflight in Italy.