Biography of Claude Nicollier

Claude Nicollier was born in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1944. He became an astrophysicist after studies in physics in Lausanne and astrophysics in Geneva. He also trained as a Swiss Air Force pilot and as an airline pilot. He is a graduate of the Empire Test Pilot’s School, Boscombe Down, United Kingdom, class of 1988. His service with the Swiss Air Force was a part-time activity from 1966 to 2004, and he flew the De Havilland Venom, Hawker Hunter and F-5E Tiger aircraft types. He was active as a First Officer on the DC-9 aircraft with SWISSAIR from 1974 to 1976.

He was selected in 1978 in the first group of the European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts, then was detached to the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, for full training as Mission Specialist on the US Space Shuttle, following an agreement between ESA and NASA. After several years of training and various jobs at JSC, he served as a crewmember on four Shuttle missions between 1992 and 1999, including two on-orbit servicing missions on the Hubble Space Telescope. During his last mission in December 1999, he performed a spacewalk of more than 8 hours duration to install new equipment on the orbiting observatory. He spent a total of more than 1000 hours in space during these four missions.

He is currently employed by “Space Innovation” in Lausanne, Switzerland, and honorary Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). For 15 years and until the end of 2014, he was teaching a Masters level course “Space Mission Design and Operations”,  currently available on line as a MOOC course provided on the edX platform. He is still giving occasional courses, on demand, at EPFL and ETHZ in Zürich.

He is a member of the Federal Commission for Space Affairs, which advises the Swiss Federal Council on matters related to the space policy of the Swiss Confederation.  Occasionally, he serves as scientific and technical advisor for students working semester or Masters projects at EPFL. He remains available for companies and educational institutions to give lectures in the fields of aeronautics and space exploration.

Assistant martine-harmel@epfl.ch

January 2026

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