Build on Rocket Launch: Finally Go! Maurer on his way to the International Space Station

Cape Canaveral (Florida) – Finally launched!

The countdown began at 3:03 AM CET (9:03 PM local time). “Ten – nine – eight – seven – six – five – four – three – two – one” kick off!

Nine Merlin 1D engines were launched from the Falcon-9. A ball of bright fire lit up in the darkness. A SpaceX rocket with 51-year-old German astronaut Matthias Maurer and three colleagues in the “Crew Dragon” space capsule (total height of 63 metres) finally lifted off from NASA’s spaceport in Cape Canaveral (Florida).

BILD got off to a great start at the Kennedy Space Center. During the “Crew-3” mission, Maurer became the first German astronaut to board a SpaceX flight. Destination: “International Space Station” (ISS).

The last two weeks before the planned start were full of delays: first a storm low over Ohio. Then one of the crew fell ill. Finally, introducing the landings of other space travelers, along with other weather issues. Rarely has there been such a streak of bad luck before starting an astronaut team. Matthias Maurer, 51, of Saarland had to show an extra dose of patience to become the 12th German to fly into space today.

Astronaut Maurer and his colleagues will stay on the International Space Station for six months — and they will conduct experiments. The three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari (commander), Thomas H. Marshburn and Kela Baron sit next to the German ESA astronaut during the flight. Apropos Esa: Cosmic Kiss chose a more poetic title for the mission. NASA has remained somewhat realistic: all adventures are run as “SpaceX Crew-3”.

The 28,000kph certification was achieved in less than ten minutes. Space travelers were pressed into their seats with three times the force of gravity (3-G). Maurer wanted to hear music while doing so. On his “Playlist”: “Lose Yourself” (Eminem), “Levitating” (Dua Lipa, DaBaby), “Thunder” (Imagine Dragons), and “No Scrubs” (TLC).

The Falcon 9 rocket developed a thrust of 690 kilotons. The engines burned for three minutes until a height of about a hundred kilometers was reached. After the rocket’s first stage — which made its way to the charge on a floating remote-controlled landing platform with the comic name “Just Read The Instructions” — ignited, the second stage of the Merlin 1C Vacuum engine ignited. fired for six minutes. After that, the “Endurance” space capsule “Crew Dragon” was launched into Earth orbit. Docking with the International Space Station is scheduled for Friday at 1:10 a.m. German time. The hatch opens after an hour and a half.

This is the fifth fully manned flight of tech billionaire Elon Musk’s space company (50) – after the first in May 2020. The launch will take place from the legendary Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) of the Kennedy Space Center. This is where the Apollo moon missions once began.

Maurer performs experiments coordinated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the Columbus module of the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of 420 kilometers. Test series with concrete and metal planned. “I love smelting metals,” he said before the flight. “We have an electromagnetic flyby furnace in the European unit, where we can heat up metal samples and let them float completely without contact.” After heating, you can “see the viscosity, measure all the different parameters and then cool it down,” says the materials researcher. Outdoor use (“space walk”) should also be planned.

SpaceX’s “wetting” problems have made headlines recently: The toilet in the previous team’s Dragon capsule (“Crew-2”) has broken. The four astronauts who plunged into the sea in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend had to ride hell out of the atmosphere wearing diapers.

However, the toilet in the crew capsule was fixed with masonry. However, a tour of the quartet was conducted before the start: “So that we do not have to go to the toilet for the next 24 hours, this is very important, then you can fly more relaxed,” Maurer explained.

With the flight, the German became the twelfth in space, the fourth on the International Space Station and the first to fly there with the “Crew Dragon”. And another round number: Saarlander has become the 600th person in space since the beginning of manned spaceflight.

The last time a German astronaut was in space was Alexander Gerst (45) in 2018, completing a total of two missions to the International Space Station. How does the astronaut feel during the countdown? “You become more relaxed the closer you get to the start, because little by little it can’t get in your way,” he describes the irony for BILD. With total focus, it also helps to “be logged every minute”. He doesn’t consider the fact that the mission was finally delayed for ten days to be too big a broken leg: “The astronauts have been training for about two years and have hardly any time off, so the days of waiting where you can relax isn’t bad at all, they can also go to Beach.” Long delays can create psychological stress.

are you scared? Not at first, says Gerst: “Think about it in advance and at some point you have to come to terms with it yourself, even with your family, you know it can end badly, there’s always that danger!” But in the last few moments, your head needs to be free to be able to focus fully.