Claude Nicollier

Claude Nicollier: The Astronomer Who Went Up to Fix the Telescope

He was selected as an astronaut in July 1978 and did not fly until July 1992 — fourteen years of waiting in Houston. When his turn came, the assignments he drew were the ones that mattered most: two flights to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, an instrument whose data he was professionally qualified to care about, having spent the early 1970s doing infrared astronomy at the Geneva Observatory. On the second of those flights, in December 1999, he spent eight hours and ten minutes outside the airlock with his hands on it.

The Physicist Who Flew Hunters

Claude Nicollier was born on 2 September 1944 and finished at the Gymnase de la Cité in Lausanne in 1962. He took a licentiate in physics at the University of Lausanne in 1970 — the European Space Agency's own biography renders it as a bachelor of science — and followed it in 1975 with a post-diploma degree in astrophysics from the University of Geneva.

Running underneath the science was an entirely separate professional life in the air. From 1966 he flew for the Swiss Air Force with Fliegerstaffel 5 on Hawker Hunters, eventually holding a captain's commission. In 1974 he became an airline pilot, flying the DC-9 for Swissair. In 1988, by then already a NASA astronaut, he added the qualification that completes the set: the Empire Test Pilots' School at Boscombe Down. His logged hours are given variously as 5,600 or, by ESA, over 6,400, of which four thousand were in jets.

Infrared at Geneva

Between 1970 and 1973 he worked as a graduate scientist at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Lausanne and at the Geneva Observatory, on infrared astronomy programmes. This is the part of the biography that gives the rest its shape. Nicollier is one of very few people who have serviced a space telescope while also knowing, from the inside, what the instrument is for and what a corrupted point-spread function costs the people waiting for the data.

Selected in 1978

In July 1978 he was named to the first group of European Space Agency astronauts. In May 1980 he joined NASA's Astronaut Group 9 for mission specialist training, becoming the first non-American to be a full-time NASA astronaut. He would remain based in Houston until 2005.

The wait was filled with the unglamorous engineering that makes flights possible: flight software verification in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory, development work on the Tethered Satellite System, and support for the Remote Manipulator System — the Shuttle's robot arm — and later for ISS robotics. From the spring of 1996 to the end of 1998 he headed the Astronaut Office's Robotics Branch; from 2000 he was assigned to the EVA Branch, and served as lead ESA astronaut in Houston.

Four Flights

STS-46 launched aboard Atlantis in 1992 — eight days, deploying the EURECA free-flying laboratory and the first Tethered Satellite System. With it Nicollier became the first Swiss citizen in space.

STS-61, aboard Endeavour in December 1993, is the reason he is in the history books. Hubble had been launched with a flawed mirror, and this ten-day mission was the rescue: the servicing flight that corrected the telescope's distorted optics and turned a very expensive embarrassment into the most productive observatory ever built. Nicollier operated the robot arm. The crew was awarded the Collier Trophy for 1993, American aviation's highest honour, the following year.

STS-75, aboard Columbia in 1996, flew the reflight of the tethered satellite, TSS-1R. Then, in December 1999, came STS-103 aboard Discovery — Hubble again, and this time Nicollier went outside. His spacewalk lasted more than eight hours, installing equipment on the telescope, and made him the first ESA astronaut to perform an EVA on a Shuttle mission.

Across four flights he accumulated over a thousand hours in space: 42 days, 12 hours and 5 minutes.

Why Claude Is Called a Genius

The interesting claim about Nicollier is not that he was cleverer than other astronauts but that he was an unusually complete instance of a rare type. Four separate professional competences, each of which takes most people a career, converge in one person: research astrophysicist, military fighter pilot, airline captain, graduate test pilot — and then, on top of those, the two hardest crafts in human spaceflight, robotic arm operation and extravehicular work, both of which he led as a branch chief rather than merely practised.

That combination is not decorative. Hubble servicing is precisely the task that requires it. The optics are a physics problem; the approach and capture are a flying problem; the arm is a robotics problem; and the repair itself is manual work done in a pressurised suit whose gloves fight every movement. Nicollier could hold the whole chain, from the point-spread function to the torque on the bolt, in one head.

The counter-case is straightforward. He formulated no theory, published no landmark paper, and his astronomy career ended in 1973 after three years as a graduate scientist. He was a mission specialist executing procedures designed by large teams on the ground, and the Collier Trophy went to the STS-61 crew collectively. Fourteen years passed between his selection and his first flight. Neither ESA's biography nor the standard reference account calls him a genius; the word most often attached to him in Switzerland is "first." What survives without inflation is that he combined deep scientific literacy with elite operational skill, and that the world's best telescope works partly because of it.

Lausanne

He began teaching at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2004 and was appointed full professor of spatial technology on 28 March 2007, retiring from ESA the following month. His course is on space mission design and operations. He also lent his test-pilot expertise to Solar Impulse, the Swiss solar-powered aircraft project, working on safety and flight testing — a return, at the end, to the aviation half of his double life.

The honours are dense. The NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 2001; four NASA Space Flight Medals, one for each mission; the Albert Einstein Medal in 1998; the Yuri Gagarin Gold Medal in 1994; induction into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1997; honorary doctorates from EPFL and the University of Geneva in 1994, and from Business School Lausanne in 2011. He was also, improbably, a guest star on *Home Improvement*.

His wife, Susana Perez, from Monterrey in Mexico, died in December 2007; they had two daughters. What survives him in the sky is more concrete than most legacies: an orbiting telescope that still produces science every day, rescued by two missions he flew on.

Achievements

• International Space Hall of Fame — 1997
• Affiliated with European Space Agency and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
• Educated at University of Geneva and University of Lausanne
• Worked as astronaut, aircraft pilot and physicist