A German astronaut is ready to develop into the 600th person to enter space and he’ll achieve this flying with a U.S. astronaut who as soon as got here near being quantity 500.
Matthias Maurer with the European Space Agency (ESA) will achieve the excellence of being the sexcentenarian space traveler when he launches to the International Space Station as a member of SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission, presently scheduled for early Sunday morning (Oct. 31). Maurer is one in every of three first-time fliers on the four-person crew, together with NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, however he was recognized by NASA because the designated milestone maker.
“I actually offered the place to Kayla, because she and I will be together [on the spacecraft], but I was the lucky one to get the round number,” Matthias stated on Tuesday (Oct. 26), soon after arriving at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for his upcoming launch. “It is okay, we will all have fun in space.”
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Maurer’s fourth crewmate, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, is flying for his third time. On Marshburn’s first mission, a space shuttle flight in 2009, he was in the same state of affairs to Maurer, however to be the 500th to leave the planet. Ultimately, it was one other crew member, Chris Cassidy, was was recognized for the title based mostly on the place he was seated on board the orbiter Endeavour.
“I think my seat might be a few feet ahead of his but then you roll upside down, which might put me even more in the lead, but it is kind of hard to say,” Marshburn informed collectSPACE.com 12 years in the past.
Aboard Endeavour, Marshburn was only a seat or two away of being quantity 500. Since that flight, his place on the checklist has modified.
“We are entering the era of commercial spaceflight and with all of the suborbital flights, they also count into the statistics,” stated Maurer on Tuesday.
As of a decade or so in the past, the depend was based mostly on each individual to fly above the Kármán line, the internationally-recognized boundary between Earth and space at 62 miles excessive (100 km). Not all industrial spaceflights attain that altitude although.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in recent times has begun awarding commercial astronaut wings for suborbital flights above 50 miles (80 km), the U.S. army’s definition of the beginning of space because the late Fifties. Following that standards, 14 extra folks make the checklist, together with X-15 rocket airplane pilots and Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crew members.
Under that depend, Cassidy slips six locations, with a member of the STS-125 crew on space shuttle Atlantis turning into quantity 500 (maybe Michael Good, who was seated in the identical location on Atlantis as Cassidy was on Endeavour).
Maurer, who was chosen by ESA to develop into an astronaut in 2015, can even be the twelfth German and twenty ninth ESA astronaut to fly into space. As a member of the Expedition 66 crew, he would be the third German and eleventh ESA astronaut to reside on the International Space Station for a long-duration keep.
Barron, who grew to become a NASA astronaut in the identical class as Chari in 2017, would be the 72nd ladies to fly into space, on both orbital or suborbital spaceflights, out of the quickly to be 601 total spacefarers since 1961.
“Six hundred in 60 years, it makes for about 10 people a year, but I think in the next few years we’ll see an exponential rise,” stated Maurer. “We’re at the dawn of a new era for spaceflight.”
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