Alexander Gerst

Education and research

Gerst graduated from the Technical High School in Öhringen in 1995, having volunteered as a scout leader, firefighter, and water rescue lifeguard. He earned a degree in geophysics with distinction from the University of Karlsruhe. From 1998 to 2003 he participated in international scientific collaborations, including field experiments in Antarctica. He completed a master's degree in earth sciences at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand from 2001 to 2003, developing volcano monitoring techniques that were published in Science Magazine.

Between 2004 and 2009 he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Hamburg, receiving his doctorate in natural sciences in 2010 for a dissertation on geophysics and volcanic eruption dynamics at Mount Erebus volcano in Antarctica. In 2007 he received the Bernd Rendel award from the German Research Foundation and has published papers including one in Nature.

In ESA

Gerst was selected as an astronaut by the European Space Agency in 2009. In September 2019 he participated in the ESA CAVES mission alongside Janette Epps, Takuya Onishi, Joshua Kutryk, Joe Acaba, and Nikolay Chub. In 2022 he took part in the ESA PANGAEA training course in Bletterbach, Nördlingen-Ries, and Lanzarote with NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson, and in the Lofoten session with ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. He first visited space as part of Expedition 40/41 from May to November 2014.

On 7 October 2014 he performed his first extravehicular activity with Reid Wiseman, moving a failed cooling pump to long-term storage and installing a new relay system for backup power to the mobile transporter; the EVA lasted 6 hours and 13 minutes. He returned to Earth on 10 November 2014 aboard Soyuz TMA-13M with Russian commander Maxim Suraev and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman. His six-month mission was named 'Blue Dot', after Carl Sagan's description of Earth as a Pale Blue Dot.

Experiments included physical science, biology, human physiology, radiation research, and technology demonstrations, along with educational outreach via a 'flying classroom'. Gerst launched on his second tour aboard Soyuz MS-09 on 6 June 2018 as part of Expedition 56/57, commanding the ISS for Expedition 57. He brought a robot assistant called 'CIMON'. He was the second ESA astronaut to command the station, after Frank de Winne, and the youngest at age 42.

His second mission was named 'Horizons'. On 20 July 2018 he took part in a live concert by the German electronic music group Kraftwerk in Stuttgart, addressing the audience and playing a synthesizer during 'Spacelab'.