An Austrian physician born in Mies (Bohemia, now Stříbro, Czech Republic) and deceased in Vienna, Herbert Pichler came to space medicine through his research on the inner ear's balance organ, building on the work of Nobel laureate Róbert Bárány. He earned his medical doctorate at the University of Innsbruck in 1945, then practised in Zurich, where in 1947 he helped identify penicillin allergy in children. As the Austrian broadcaster ORF's space commentator for the Gemini and Apollo missions, he made television history by staying on air for 28 hours and 28 minutes during the Apollo 11 landing on 20–21 July 1969, earning the nickname "Mondpichler". Austria's delegate to the 1968 United Nations conference on outer space and in regular contact with NASA from the early 1960s, he published Die Mondlandung (1969), promptly translated into French as La conquête de la Lune.