The flight planned for Sunday by astronaut Matthias Maurer was postponed to Wednesday at short notice.
A storm over the Atlantic was the cause.
Maurer and his NASA colleagues are calm.
Cape Canaveral - After a postponement due to a storm over the Atlantic, the German astronaut Matthias Maurer will now fly into space on Wednesday (November 3rd).
Together with NASA colleagues Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, Maurer is to take off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport and fly to the ISS in a "Crew Dragon" from the private space company SpaceX owned by Elon Musk. For the first time in three years, a German would fly into space again, the last time Alexander Gerst was on the ISS in 2018. Maurer would be the twelfth German in space, the fourth on the ISS - and the first to fly there in a “Crew Dragon”.
The launch was actually planned for Sunday, but around 24 hours before the launch, the US space agency Nasa announced the postponement to Wednesday. It is true that Cape Canaveral itself had “fantastic conditions”, as Will Ulrich, NASA's weather expert, said. The spaceport is located directly on palm-fringed beaches in an area popular with tourists. The place Cape Canaveral advertises with the slogan "Sun, Space and Sea" - sun, space and sea.
A “large storm system” in the further course of the flight route over the Atlantic, which caused strong winds, ultimately led to the postponement. The start is now planned for next Wednesday at 1:10 a.m. local time. This corresponds to 6:10 a.m. Central European Time - after the clocks were set back from 3:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. on Sunday. According to NASA, the chances of favorable weather on the new start date were initially 80 percent.
The postponement of the start was taken up "very professionally" by the crew around Maurer, said the head of the German Space Agency at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Walther Pelzer. Maurer himself commented on Twitter: "Enjoy your Sunday sleep and a few more days to get used to the change from CEST to CET." Press conference said.
The crew spends the time leading up to the new start date with routine work, explained Pelzer. “You have the opportunity to go through some things again in detail. And it's time to make contact with family and friends. ”There are currently no plans to shorten or cancel experiments on the ISS due to the postponement. "It can be that you compress things."
On the ISS, Maurer will carry out numerous experiments over a period of around six months at an altitude of around 400 kilometers and will also complete an outdoor assignment. "With between 100 and 150 experiments that we then carry out, there is a certain expectation," said Maurer. “I will do my best to ensure that the best results are actually achieved.” At 51, Maurer is the oldest German astronaut on a maiden flight. The man with a doctorate in materials science left more than 8,000 candidates behind after his application to the European space agency Esa and trained for years for the journey into weightlessness.
On the ISS, Maurer will also meet the French Esa astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who has been there since April.
Following Maurer, the Italian Esa astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is scheduled to fly to the ISS in 2022 - this would be the first time that three Esa astronauts would be on the space station one after the other.
Maurer suggested that he also had a present for Pesquet.
However, their time together on the ISS will probably only be short: According to NASA, Pesquet and his crew - the NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur as well as the Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide - should leave the ISS again "early in November".
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Meanwhile, Maurer remains excited until the start.
"I've dreamed of reaching the top and just enjoying the view of our beautiful planet for a very long time," said the astronaut.
“The first thing I want to do in a free moment is to float into our space window and do a complete lap around the world, that's 90 minutes, just to soak in myself and just feel what it means outside of ours Floating planets and seeing our planets hanging there in front of the black of the universe. ”Dpa