Officer of the German Air Force specializing in aerospace medical science, he worked for two years at NASA at the Johnson Space Center, between the Apollo and Skylab programs, alongside scientists from the Skylab project. He has 18,000 hours of flight experience (by plane) and is a specialist in topics related to hyperbaric oxygenation and spatial disorientation. Together with Von Braun, he was one of the Germans recruited by NASA after World War II.