Jean-Loup Jacques Marie Chrétien
Jean-Loup Jacques Marie Chrétien is a French Air Force officer, test pilot, and CNES astronaut who became the first French citizen and first western European to fly in space. His career began in military aviation and test flying before France entered crewed spaceflight through cooperation with the Soviet Union.
- Born
- August 20, 1938
- Died
- N/A
- Birthplace
- La Rochelle,France
Flights
3
Spacewalks
1
EVA time
5 hours, 57 minutes
In space
43 days, 11 hours, 19 minutes
Bio
Chrétien's first flight was Soyuz T-6 in 1982, a Franco-Soviet mission to Salyut 7. The short mission carried a program of French scientific experiments and made him a visible symbol of Western European participation in human spaceflight beyond the United States.
He returned to a Soviet station in 1988 on Soyuz TM-7 for the Mir Aragatz mission. During that flight, Chrétien performed the first by a non-Soviet and non-American space traveler, working outside Mir with Alexander Volkov for 5 hours and 57 minutes.
His third mission was STS-86, a Shuttle-Mir docking flight aboard Atlantis in 1997. Across three missions he linked Salyut, Mir, and Shuttle-Mir history, making his career one of the clearest bridges between early European participation and later international station partnership.