COSMONAUT SURVIVAL unfortunately wrong point in time!

26.07.2011

It could have been so nice: 10 years ago, we invested a lot of planning, effort and money...

... to set a new milestone in developing space tourism, having the first commercial participant in an official team training of ISS crews!

After long negotiations with the help of EADS Astrium and their links to the Russian Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Andreas could actually join the 7th ISS crew (Yuri Malentchenko RUS and Ed Lu USA) for one week to rehearse survival procedures after a water emergency landing of the Soyuz space capsule. On board the warship SB 36 off the coast of Sochi (Black Sea) he was involved every day in all processes of this highly concentrated training, and in the evenings he celebrated with the crew. With Ed Lu, the Hawaiian among the NASA astronaut, he shared not only the room but also the experience that Water Survival Training is one of the hardest challenges in astronaut training.

You wouldn't believe how crowded and stuffy a space capsule is when it's dancing like a cork on the water and a 3 man crew tries to peel from their space suits in order to don the water survival suits before opening the hatch and exit the spaceship. The sun burns down on the capsule; ventilation is off as soon as you open the space suit; the suits are bulky, and the swell makes coordinated movements almost impossible.

But it's all been for a good cause: with this spectacular event, we wanted to make a wider public familiar with the various possibilities of early spaceflight commercialization. So for our return to Germany, we had already arranged press events, in the Frankfurt airport the first interviews were to be given.

Now why was the timing so wrong?
Simple answer: The training began on September 12, 2001, and on that day all around the world a completely different issue had just pushed to the foreground.

Really bad luck...