40/41 He visited space as part of the Expedition 40/41 International Space Station crew from May to November 2014. On 7 October 2014, Gerst performed his first extravehicular activity (EVA) with Reid Wiseman. The astronauts moved a failed cooling pump from temporary to long-term storage on the station's truss. They also installed a new relay system that will provide backup power options to the mobile transporter, which moves the large robotic arm around the out outside of the space station. The duration of the EVA was 6 hours and 13 minutes. On 10 November 2014, he landed on Earth in the same Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft that flew him to the International Space Station on 28 May along with Russian commander Maxim Suraev and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman. Gerst's six-month mission to the ISS was named "Blue Dot". The mission's name is reminiscent of Carl Sagan's description of Earth as a Pale Blue Dot as seen on a photograph taken by NASA's Voyager mission. The mission experiments included experiments in physical science, biology, human physiology, radiation research, and technology demonstrations. Educational outreach included educational videos as part of the "flying classroom" and set of experiments performed in microgravity. Expedition 56/57 Gerst launched his second tour to the ISS on Soyuz MS-09 on 6 June 2018, as part of Expedition 56/57. He is the commander of the ISS for Expedition 57. He will bring a robot assistant called "CIMON". He was the second European Space Agency astronaut to command the station, after Frank de Winne commanded Expedition 21, and also the youngest astronaut to command the station, at age 42 as of October 2018. In May 2017, his mission name and logo were announced, called "Horizons". On 20 July 2018, while on the ISS, Gerst took part in a live concert by the German electronic music group Kraftwerk in the German city of Stuttgart. He addressed the audience and played a synthesizer during the performance of the song "Spacelab". On 20 December 2018 he and his crewmates Serena Aunon-Chancellor and Sergey Prokopyev returned to Earth and landed in Kazakhstan after 197 days in space, combined with the 165 days in space on his last mission, Gerst has 362 days in space, more than any other ESA astronaut in history. In 2020 Luca Parmitano surpassed this record with 367 days in space. Personal life Gerst is single, and in his spare time he