Jean-Loup Chrétien

Jean-Loup Chrétien
Country:	France
Organization:	CNES
selected on	June 12, 1980
Calls:	3 space flights
Start of the first space flight:	June 24, 1982
Landing of the last space flight:	October 6, 1997
Time in space:	43d 11h 19min
EVA inserts:	1
EVA total duration:	6h 00min
retired on	July 2001
Space flights
Soyuz T-6 (1982) Premier vol habité Soyuz TM-7 / Soyuz TM-6 (1988) Mir-Aragatz STS-86 (1997)

Jean-Loup Jacques Marie Chrétien (born August 20, 1938 in La Rochelle , Charente-Maritime department , France ) is a former French spaceman (Spationaut) and test pilot . He was the first French and the first Western European to go into space.

education

After attending various schools in Ploujean , Saint-Brieuc and Morlaix , he studied from 1959 to 1961 at the Academy of the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence . After training as a jet pilot, he served with a squadron in Orange until 1970 .

He then graduated from the French EPNER test pilot school and worked as a test pilot in Istres for seven years .

Astronaut activity

After the French space agency CNES received an offer from the USSR in April 1979 that a French spaceman could fly aboard a Soyuz spacecraft , suitable candidates for France's first manned space flight, the Premier vol habité , were sought from September 1979 .

Chrétien applied and was selected as one of two candidates in June 1980. From September 1980 he was in the Soviet Union for training, the following year he was nominated as a cosmonaut for the Soyuz T-6 flight . On June 24, 1982 , he was the first Western European to go into space. Together with Vladimir Dschanibekow and Alexander Ivantschenkow , he docked with the Salyut 7 space station , which was already manned by the cosmonauts Anatoly Berezovoy and Valentin Lebedev . After seven days, Chrétien returned to earth.

After this mission he became head of the CNES astronaut office.

The Americans also offered France an opportunity for a manned space flight. In 1984 and 1985, Chrétien was a substitute for Patrick Baudry on the STS-51G space shuttle mission , which started in June 1985.

From 1987, Chrétien began preparing for the Soviet-French research project Mir-Aragatz , which included a visit to the Soviet Mir space station . Chrétien took off on his second space flight on November 26, 1988 on board Soyuz TM-7 . This made him the first cosmonaut from a host country to fly twice on board a Soviet spaceship. Together with Alexander Volkov and Sergei Krikalev , he linked to the Mir, which was already manned by Vladimir Titov , Musa Manarov and Valeri Polyakov . In addition to various scientific experiments, on December 9, 1988, he was the first non-US or Soviet spaceman to ever undertake a space exit that lasted six hours. The return flight to earth took place after 24 days in the Soyuz TM-6 spacecraft together with Titow and Manarov.

Between 1990 and 1993 Chrétien was trained as a pilot of the Soviet space shuttle Buran , which however did not complete a manned flight.

From 1995 Chrétien worked again at NASA in Houston . For his third space flight he took off on September 26, 1997 on board the US space shuttle Atlantis for the STS-86 mission . This flight also led to the Mir, which at the time was manned by Anatoly Solowjew , Pawel Winogradow and Colin Michael Foale . The flight lasted ten days.

In 2000 Chrétien became a US citizen. His second wife, Amy Kristine Jensen, is American.

In 2001 he lost his pilot's license after an accident through no fault of his own in a hardware store , left NASA and was officially retired from the NASA astronaut corps on November 3, 2001. He is fluent in English and Russian and has received many awards including Hero of the Soviet Union and Commander of the Legion of Honor . He retired from active service as Général de brigade aérienne en deuxième section (equivalent to a retired major general in Germany) and is active in the private sector, in Houston (Texas) as Vice President for Tietronix Software.

See also

• List of space shuttle missions
• List of manned missions to the Mir space station
• List of Soyuz missions
• European space travel
• List of spacemen
• List of space exits

Web links

Commons : Jean-Loup Chrétien  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography of Jean-Loup Chrétien at spacefacts.de
• Biography of Jean-Loup Chrétien in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)