Fatherhood Quote by Claude Nicollier

Nicollier’s line has the quiet force of a résumé footnote that turns out to be the whole story. An astronaut is supposed to narrate his origin myth in rocket fuel: grit, destiny, the singular dream. Instead he points, almost disarmingly, to a father who built things for a living and kept building a life well into old age. The effect is to shrink the glamour of spaceflight down to something sturdier and more relatable: apprenticeship.

The specificity matters. A civil engineer in Switzerland evokes a culture of precision, systems, and public trust - a world where you’re trained to think in tolerances, not slogans. That’s a direct bridge to astronautics, where a small miscalculation can become an obituary. By calling his father “the most help I got,” Nicollier subtly rejects the lone-genius narrative that often clings to high-achievement careers. Space, he implies, is a team sport long before NASA; the first team is family.

Then he pivots: “90 years old now... no longer active as a civil engineer, but still a very active person.” The repetition of “active” is doing emotional work. It separates vocation from vitality, suggesting that retirement doesn’t have to mean decline, and that competence can age into character. Subtext: the best inheritance isn’t money or prestige, it’s a model of sustained curiosity and discipline.

Coming from a European astronaut who flew in the Shuttle era, the quote also reads as a gentle correction to American heroic mythology. The origin of extraordinary exploration, Nicollier hints, can be ordinary steadiness - the kind that pours concrete, checks the math, and keeps moving.