High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Ulf Dietrich Merbold (born June 20, 1941) is the first West German and second German astronaut as well as the first ESA astronaut to fly in space. He holds the distinction of being the first non-US citizen to reach orbit in a US spacecraft. In 1983, he and Byron Lichtenberg became the first Payload Specialists to fly on the shuttle. Merbold was born in Greiz, Thuringia just 40 kilometers from where Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space, was born. Both happened to grow up in the socialist German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. After he finished school in 1960, Merbold, as thousands others before the Berlin wall was built, defected to the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). He studied physics at the University of Stuttgart, earning a diploma in 1968 and a doctorate in 1976. He then joined the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, where he worked on solid state physics and low temperature physics.