After Delft – Joris Thijssen
Joris Thijssen’s fascination with space travel began when, as a child, he heard that Wubbo Ockels was going to be an astronaut. His studies however, do not take him to space but to Greenpeace.
Joris Thijssen
Place of residence: MuiderbergCivil status: Living together, two sons
Degree programme: Aerospace Engineering (1992-2000)
Association: Proteus-Eretes
How amazing is that? As a child Wubbo Ockels inspired you to become an astronaut and years later you hear that the same Ockels is to be a professor at your TU Delft. Joris Thijssen wasted no time and asked Ockels what he needed to do to be supervised by him for his graduation project. He was told that he first needed to be a bit further along in his studies – he’d only just finished his first year.
Thijssen thought there was more to life than studying and after his second year he went travelling for a year. It got him thinking about what mankind is ‘doing’ to the earth and he decided to volunteer for Greenpeace alongside his studies. Thijssen’s inner environmental activist was born.
In 2000, under Ockels supervision (of course!), he graduated with a project examining the design of the Lunar Lander that would go to the South Pole of the moon with the Ariane 4 rocket. He investigated whether this could also be an Ariane 5 mission with extra satellites and how the rocket could fly to the moon from an orbit around the Earth.
Thijssen then went to Russia with Greenpeace for six weeks to attract public attention to Shell’s oil spills. With another TU alumnus, Diederik Samsom (now a politician in the Dutch Labour Party), he carried out measurements in France to detect radioactive discharge.
Back in the Netherlands, he worked for Greenpeace as a typist. The ‘old hands’ showed him the ropes of campaigning. His degree proved to be useful. “We analyse the environmental problem, look for a solution and take action based on that,” he says. Within a year he was appointed campaign manager, first for nuclear energy and then for climate change.
Nevertheless, Thijssen deliberated for a long time whether he should do something with his engineering degree. In 2003 he applied for a job at Astrium in England, the civil aerospace division of the European defence company, EADS, where he had done an internship. A day before he was about to start, he was called to say his position had been dropped due to budget cuts.
Greenpeace welcomed him back as a campaign manager. In 2007 he helped the office in China and then went on to work with 20 offices all over the world at Greenpeace International, until he became a father and wanted to travel less. The ‘mystery of management’, as he calls it, beckoned. He became campaign director and in 2016 was appointed director of Greenpeace Nederland.
Straight after, he and others connected a 500m line between two wind turbines in Eemshaven and hung there strapped in climbing harnesses, for 24 hours to stop a coal ship from passing. “My coolest protest.”