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Starting in July, geophysicist Josef Aschbacher will be the first Austrian to head the European Space Agency ESA.
Paris / Vienna / Innsbruck. From Bergdoktor-Land to the top of the European Space Agency, ESA is not a bad rise: the Council of ESA in Paris on Thursday elected the Austrian Josef Aschbacher as the new Director General of the organization, which is supported by 22 member states. The 58-year-old will replace ESA’s German director Jan Wörner in July. Aschbacher beat off applicants from Norway and Spain, he will be the first Austrian to head ESA, which was founded in 1975 and whose bosses have come from Britain, Denmark, Italy and twice from France and Germany.
ESA is the third largest space organization in terms of budget and in terms of scientific and technical production (such as rockets, satellites, flights to other heavenly bodies) in the league of Americans and Russians (China recently recovered significantly, see higher). Notably, Austria will only contribute a good one percent of ESA’s state budget of 4.9 billion euros in 2020 (including other sources, it is 6.7 billion euros with around 2,200 employees in various locations). NASA’s budget was $ 22.6 billion with more than 17,000 employees.
Aschbacher hails from the bucolic Ellmau in the Tyrolean district of Kufstein, where he grew up the son of a farming family. He saw the 1969 moon landing on television, prompting him to choose a career. Instead of taking over the farm, he went to secondary school, studied meteorology and geophysics in Innsbruck. As a student, he unsuccessfully applied for the Austromir Austro-Russian cosmonaut mission and, after completing his thesis, got a job at ESA in 1989 at the Esrin Institute for Space Research in Frascati, near Rome.
He later participated in the creation of the Copernicus Earth Observation program. In 2016 he became ESA’s Director of Earth Observation and Head of Esrin and thus the first Austrian on ESA’s ten-member Board of Directors. Aschbacher is married with three children. (wg)
(“Die Presse”, print edition, December 18, 2020)
