Christer Fuglesang

Happy birthday Christer Fuglesang! Born in 1957 in Stockholm, Sweden, Fuglesang studied engineering physics at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology; he then went on to earn a PhD in experimental particle physics at Stockholm University. In 1992, while he was working at CERN on the LHC project, Fuglesang was selected for the European Space Agency’s astronaut program. Although his initial training was for an ESA mission to visit Russia’s Mir space station, it was with NASA that he went into space -- on two missions, both to the International Space Station. On the first of his missions, STS-116, Fuglesang set a frisbee spinning for 20 seconds in the air. Because the record “time aloft” occurred in space, not on Earth, the record-keeping authorities awarded a Fuglesang the galactic record.

Date in History: 18 March 1957