The German astronaut Matthias Maurer has to be patient. Because of a “minor medical problem” with one of the four crew members, his start to the ISS has been postponed again.
Cape Canaveral – The start of the German astronaut Matthias Maurer to the International Space Station ISS has been postponed again.
The US space agency Nasa announced that the launch could no longer take place as planned on Wednesday due to a “minor medical problem with one of the crew members”. “The problem is not a medical emergency and has nothing to do with Covid-19.” The health of the crew members will continue to be monitored. A new start attempt is now possible at the earliest on Saturday at 11.36 p.m. local time (04.36 a.m. on Sunday CET). At first it was not disclosed which crew member it was.
Actually it should have started on Sunday
The start was actually planned for Sunday and had to be postponed to Wednesday due to bad weather. With Maurer, a German astronaut will fly into space for the first time in three years. Together with his NASA colleagues Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, the 51-year-old Saarland native is to take off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida to the ISS space station. The four astronauts are to be transported by a “Crew Dragon” from Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX.
With the flight, Maurer would be the twelfth German in space, the fourth on the ISS and the first to fly there with a “Crew Dragon”. On the ISS, the astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA) will carry out numerous experiments for about six months at an altitude of around 400 kilometers and will probably also complete an outdoor mission. The last time a German Esa astronaut was in space was Alexander Gerst in 2018. dpa
