Born in Bussalla in 1946, Malerba was the first Italian astronaut. After graduating in
electronic engineering and physics in 1970 from Genoa University, he became a researcher
at the CNR in Genoa, and has worked at the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda in
the USA, the Saclant NATO centre in La Spezia and the European Space Centre ESA-ESTEC at
Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
He was strategic planning engineer (information technology and telecommunications) at
the Digital Equipment Corp. headquarters in Geneva, and its centres in Rome and Sophia
Antipolis in France from 1980 to 1989.
Chosen by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) in 1989 as payload specialist on the Tethered
Satellite System- the first Italian manned space mission - he underwent flight training
with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and undertook his first space
mission in 1992.
The mission, launched 31st July 1992 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis from the Kennedy
Space Center (Cape Canaveral) with Malerba and six other astronauts on board, orbited the
European space platform Eureka and launched and recovered the Italian satellite.
Malerba is an occasional contributor to Corriere della Sera and La Stampa and author of
the popular science book "La vetta / the summit". He is a founding member of the
Italian Space Society.
