We turn 50! 🎉 Meet some of the brilliant people behind half a century of missions, discoveries, and innovation. Roy Gibson was our very first Director General. Born in 1924, he led the Agency from its foundation in 1975 until 1980. Ulf Merbold was our first astronaut to fly in space, as part of the crew of the STS-9 Spacelab 1 mission on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1983. Claudie Haigneré made history in 2001 as the first female European astronaut on a ‘taxi flight’ to the International Space Stat