February 7, UNIVERSEH and Vauban, Ecole et Lycée Français de Luxembourg welcomed Patrick BAUDRY . The French astronaut gave the conference and shared his extraordinary experience is space, especially the flight on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985.
Patrick Baudry is the most renowned French astronaut and a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the French Air Force. In 1985 he became the second French citizen in space when he flew aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle mission STS-51-G Discovery.
Patrick Baudry became a CNES astronaut in 1980. When he arrived in Moscow, in the USSR at the time, Patrick Baudry was given the title of Cosmonaut. He learns to deserve it in any case. Selected by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales to form the first group of French cosmonauts, he followed the rigorous training of Soviet cosmonauts at the Cité des Etoiles near Moscow, until 1982. For two years, he trained at CNES and at Star City near Moscow. He was a member of the back-up crew of the French-Soviet mission and was trained for scientific experiments in the fields of physiology, biology, materials processing in space, and astronomy. He was selected from a pool of 2000 candidates to take part in the Interkosmos – CNES orbital space mission.
In 1984 he joined the Johnson Space Centre, Houston, Texas. After a year of training, he was assigned to the Mission 51-E and then to the Mission 51-G. The main objective of the mission, was to deliver three satellites into orbit. Baudry had responsibility for a scientific and medical programme for French and American research laboratories.
At the peak of his space career, Baudry flew as a payload specialist on STS-51G Discovery (June 17-24, 1985). The international crew aboard Discovery deployed communications satellites for Mexico, the Arab League, and the United States. They deployed and later retrieved the SPARTAN satellite, which performed 17 hours of x-ray astronomy experiments. In completing this flight, Baudry travelled 2.5 million miles in 112 Earth orbits, logging over 169 hours in space.
For more information about Patrick’s Baudry biography visit the website.
