Eytan Stibbe

Origins and early life

Eytan Stibbe was born in Haifa in 1958 to parents who had immigrated from the Netherlands to Israel five years earlier; the family spent his first seven years in the United States before returning to Ramat Gan.

Work and career

He entered the Israeli Air Force's fighter pilot course in July 1976, flew Skyhawks, then Phantoms, then F-16s in 117 Squadron under the command of Colonel Ilan Ramon, who would become Israel's first astronaut and die aboard Columbia; Stibbe remained a reservist in that squadron until 2012 and reached the rank of colonel. In business he co-founded the LR Group in 1985, building infrastructure in developing countries, and in 2010 founded Vital Capital, an impact fund.

In April 2022 he flew on Axiom Mission 1 and became the second Israeli in space and the first to board the International Space Station, staying seventeen days and running thirty-five experiments. He named the mission Rakia — the Hebrew word for the firmament, and the title of the book made from the surviving fragments of Ramon's diary. What he carried says the rest: a Hanukkah dreidel, a glass cube inscribed with the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel, and a coin from the Bar Kokhba revolt found in the Cave of Horrors, given to him by the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Of the coin he said: “It was clear to me that one of these items will be a symbol of Jewish history.” No source calls him Jewish in that single word; his own words about carrying Jewish history, and the objects he chose, are the route this card states. Since July 2025 he has been chancellor of the International Space University.