Franco Malerba

Space V s.r.l. • Founder

Franco Malerba is the first Italian astronaut; he flew in space with the space shuttle Atlantis in 1992, as the payload specialist of the first mission of the Tethered Satellite.

Franco Malerba is a founding partner of Space V Srl, an Italian startup that is developing a patented adaptive greenhouse for agrotechnological research aimed at producing plant-based foods in space.

After a master in Electronics engineering and a PhD in Physics at the University of Genoa (Italy), Malerba served as Reserve Officer of the Italian Navy. From 1975 to 1989 worked as research scientist at the Italian Research Council (CNR), at the National Institutes of Health (NIH, USA), at the European Space Agency ESA (ESTEC-Noordwjik, Nl) and as Product Line manager at Digital Equipment Corp.(DEC).

Selected in 1989 by ASI and NASA for the STS 46 space shuttle mission, trained for spaceflight at the NASA-JSC Centre in Houston and served as Payload Specialist of the first Tethered Satellite System experiment in space (31 July-8 Aug 1992).

Elected Member of the European Parliament (94-99), was the rapporteur for the EU Space Policy and the European Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) program.

Was director of Alenia Spazio’s European Institutional Markets Office in Paris (99-2005) and Science Attaché of the Italian Permanent Delegation to the International Organisations in Paris (2005-13).

Since 2017, Franco Malerba has organized the Italian Space Festival in Busalla, under the patronage of the Italian Space Agency.

Events

International Astronautical Congress 2024

14-18 October 2024

Milan, Italy

Participation: