Prof. Dr. Ulrich Walter

Ulrich Walter, born in 1954, is a full professor for astronautics at the Technical University at Munich, Germany.

Ulrich Walter studied physics and received his Ph.D. in 1985 in the field of solid state physics at the University of Cologne, Germany, with research visits at the nuclear research centers Jülich, Germany, and ILL Grenoble, France. Thereafter he spent one year at the US research laboratory Argonne National Laboratories in Chicago and another year at the university of California, Berkeley, as a postdoctoral student. In 1987 he was appointed a member of the German team of science astronauts to fly the Shuttle Mission STS-55, April 26 to May 6, 1993, with 89 scientific experiments. In 1994 Walter headed the development of the “German Satellite Data Archive” of the German Remote Data Sensing Center of the DLR (German Aerospace Center) in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, Germany. In 1998 he went to the IBM Development Laboratory in Böblingen as a program manager in charge of development and consulting for IBM software products and as lead consultant for IBM Pervasive Computing software products.

Since March 2003 he holds the chair of the Institute of Astronautics at the Technical University, Munich. He lectures and does research and development in unmanned an manned space technology and in systems engineering. His main research is in real-time space robotics, intersatellite link communication technologies, technologies for planetary exploration, and system modelling and optimization. He wrote seven books, including the textbook “Astronautics – The Physics of Space Flight”, and published more than 100 scientific and numerous popular science articles in various international journals. From 1998 until 2003 he hosted the puplic science program “MaxQ” at Bavarian TV, in 2011 he hosted the German TV series “On the Way through Space with Ulrich Walter” and other TV specials on National Geographic Channel. Since 2013 to date he publishes a weekly column “Science achieves” on the web pages of the German TV news channel N24. Since Summer 2016 he hosts the weekly N24 science documentary “Spacetime”.

Ulrich Walter is president of the Hermann-Oberth-Museum in Feucht and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Deutsches Museum (German Technical Museum) at Munich. Walter has been awarded several honors, among them the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Wernher von Braun Medal. He is bearing the honorary professor of the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University of Ukraine, the consultant professor of the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, the honorary doctorate of the Technical University of Ukraine, Kiev, and was elected German Professor of the Year 2008 in Engineering Sciences.