The start had been postponed several times – but now, for the first time in three years, a German astronaut, Matthias Maurer, has started towards the ISS.
Cape Canaveral – For the first time in three years, Matthias Maurer, a German astronaut, set off for the International Space Station.
The 51-year-old from Saarland started on Thursday with three NASA colleagues using a “Falcon 9” rocket on board a “Crew Dragon” from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida. The start had previously been postponed several times – first because of bad weather conditions, then because of a “minor medical problem” with one of the crew members and finally another crew had to be fetched back from the ISS.
“Crew-3” is supposed to dock at the ISS after a 22 hour flight
After around 22 hours of flight, Maurer and his NASA colleagues Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron – the so-called “Crew-3” – are supposed to dock with the ISS on Friday. Maurer is now the twelfth German in space, will be the fourth on the ISS – and is the first to fly in a “Crew Dragon” of the private space agency SpaceX owned by Elon Musk. It is the third astronaut transport to the ISS with a spacecraft from SpaceX, previously there had already been a successful manned test with a “Crew Dragon”.
Maurer is supposed to carry out numerous experiments on the ISS at a height of around 400 kilometers for about six months, and the astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA) is also expected to complete an outdoor mission. The last time a German Esa astronaut was in space was Alexander Gerst in 2018.
Maurer trained for the flight for years
At 51, Maurer is the oldest German spaceman on a maiden flight. After applying to Esa, the man with a doctorate in materials science left more than 8,000 candidates behind and trained for years for the journey into weightlessness.
Actually, Maurer should have met his French colleague Thomas Pesquet on the ISS, who had been there since April. Because of the many shifts, Pesquet and his crew – the NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur and the Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide – could no longer wait for the “Crew-3” to arrive and returned to Earth on Tuesday. Following Maurer, the Italian Esa astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is to fly to the ISS in 2022 – this would be the first time three Esa astronauts were on the space station one after the other. dpa
