From Garching to Hawaii

As a student in secondary school, Hasinger played in a rock band. The group of five young, long-haired men called themselves “Saffran” (“Saffron”) and played experimental krautrock with Hasinger on bass and occasionally on the transverse flute. Saffran was one of the three or four hottest bands around Munich at the time and was even covered in Bravo magazine. 

Hasinger had always been a tech enthusiast, so he got to solder any broken cables and replace the tubes in the amps for Saffran. When the band recorded its first album, he spent so much time in the studio that he completely forgot to apply to university. At some point his mother called because she was worried about losing her child benefit. “So I finally went to the university, and the only subject I could start immediately with my high school grades was physics.” 

Cosmology came first, despite Hasinger’s love of music

During the semester break, he did an internship at the observatory in Munich. Since all of his colleagues there were on vacation at the time, he was the only one present to witness the Nova Cygni’s unusual birth in 1978. That was the moment his love of astronomy began. He fiddled with the spectrograph and improved the view step by step so he could still observe traces of the nova in the heavens weeks later. And he continued to do so until Oktoberfest eventually began and the lights from the rides and stalls obscured the skies. From then on, Hasinger couldn’t imagine his life without space.

Does his continued enthusiasm get on some people’s nerves these days—for example, his wife’s? “We’ve settled into a healthy routine over the years,” Hasinger says. Which is to say, he tries not to think about space too much when he’s at home. Instead, he and his wife frequent museums; they have an annual membership in Madrid so they can explore a different exhibition every weekend. Their favorite is the Museo del Prado, the famous art museum known for its works by the Spanish masters.

Hasinger is still in touch with his old bandmates from Saffran. One of them became a jazz musician and tours the clubs, while another played for Roy Black for many years before working as a solo entertainer on a cruise ship. Hasinger says he loved music but that he probably loved the planets, satellites, and his research just a little bit more. At the end of this year, he wants to travel to Kourou in French Guiana again after completing his activities as an expert assessor at Helmholtz. That’s when the next ESA satellite, Cheops, is scheduled to be launched into space.

The liftoff has been set for December 17. The Ministerial Council will be determining a new budget for ESA shortly prior to that in Seville. Hasinger notes that ESA’s Science Faculty has unfortunately been “stuck in the shadows” to some extent over the last 15 years because other topics have typically been at the forefront of public discourse. The Science Faculty at ESA is allotted 530 million euros per year, around a tenth of the total budget. Hasinger wants to increase this figure. 

There are still so many secrets out there, he says. One that he definitely wants to see revealed as soon as possible is whether the theory that black holes are actually dark matter is true. “We don’t know much about either one, and getting to the bottom of this would be killing two birds with one stone.” He would love to witness this discovery before the end of his career.

Hasinger and his wife want to make Berlin their main residence in the near future. One of their two sons lives there and is a bioengineer who researches early diagnosis methods for prostate cancer at a start-up. Their granddaughter is four and a half, and Hasinger says he has already succeeded in getting her a bit interested in space. “Her latest question is why we need the stars at night when we can just turn on the lights.”