Roberto Vittori

Roberto Vittori is an Italian Air Force officer and European Space Agency astronaut who graduated from the Italian Air Force Academy in 1989, flew Tornado aircraft, and trained as a test pilot in the United States, ranking first in his class at the Naval Test Pilot School in 1995. Selected by the ESA in 1998 to join the European Astronaut Corps, he flew three spaceflights, a Soyuz TM-34 taxi mission to the International Space Station in 2002, a return visit aboard Soyuz TMA-6 in 2005 that made him the first European to visit the station twice, and the 2011 Space Shuttle mission STS-134, on which he was the last non-American to fly aboard the Shuttle. He logged over 35 days in space across his three missions and now holds the rank of Air Commodore in the Italian Air Force.