German astronaut Matthias Maurer is now flying back to earth

German ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer will return to Earth in a few hours together with his NASA colleagues Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron (the so-called “Crew-3”), ESA has announced. A few hours ago, Maurer and his colleagues entered the Crew Dragon capsule Endurance, undocked autonomously from the ISS and are already on their way to Earth.

Landfall is scheduled for 6:43 a.m. Friday, May 6, 2022 off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean. There the capsule is awaited by ships. Maurer will then fly back to ESA’s European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany, where he is expected to arrive around 9.30pm on Friday.

NASA provides an overview of the schedule here and will livestream the return.

After his arrival on November 12, 2021, Maurer spent almost six months on the ISS. Maurer went on a spectacular “space walk” with a colleague: a German astronaut shows photos of his space walk. Maurer and his colleagues had previously had to survive a rain of debris that the Russian space agency apparently caused when it shot down an old Russian satellite with a rocket At least NASA raises this accusation: Russia destroys satellites – ISS crew flees from debris rain.

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Review of November 12th, 2021:

The Crew Dragon with SpaceX Crew 3 successfully docked with the ISS tonight. The photo above shows all the astronauts currently on the ISS. On the far right the German ESA astronaut Dr. Matthew Maurer. The following NASA tweet shows the new crew entering the ISS and being greeted by colleagues who have been there for many months:

The German ESA astronaut Dr. Matthias Maurer took off on Thursday, November 11, 2021 at 3:03 a.m. (CET) together with Crew-3 to the International Space Station ISS. NASA announced that the Falcon 9 rocket took off on schedule.

The flight takes around 22 hours. Then the “Crew-3” should dock at the ISS. This flight marks the third manned flight with a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

Enlarge

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launches with the Crew Dragon and NASA’s SpaceX Crew 3 mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the ISS. On board are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer.

© NASA/Joel Kowsky

So you could follow the start live on December 12th, 2021

German Aerospace Center DLR

Here on Youtube the live stream of the DLR.

Here on Twitter

Here on Facebook

NASA

NASA broadcast the launch here on their website.

Here you can find the YouTube stream to start with.

here

tweeted NASA at launch.

The NASA Facebook page.

Maurer waited and waited and waited

After Alexander Gerst was the last German astronaut on the ISS until December 20, 2018, a German has now started to the ISS again: The 51-year-old ESA astronaut Dr. Matthias Maurer together with the three NASA astronauts Raja Chari (commander), Thomas Marshburn (pilot) and Kayla Barron (mission specialist). The four astronauts fly from the Kennedy Space Center at the Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome in a Crew Dragon and on a Falcon 9 rocket – both built by Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX – to the ISS. The ISS Expedition 66 bears the designation “ Cosmic Kiss ”.

The launch of the rocket was originally scheduled for October 31, 2021 at 7:21 a.m. our winter time.

But due to bad weather, the start from Sunday, October 31st, was initially postponed to Wednesday, November 3rd, at 6:10 a.m. local time.

Maurer took the postponement calmly, as you could see from his tweet:

But it didn’t stay at this date, there were further postponements. So the four astronauts are still waiting for the start today. It should finally be ready tomorrow.

Short biography of Matthias Maurer

Matthias Maurer studied materials science and engineering as well as industrial engineering. The German astronaut will carry out over 100 scientific experiments developed by scientific consortia (36 of them from Germany alone) on the space station.

With its Columbus control center, the German Space Operations Center at DLR Oberpfaffenhofen is responsible for planning and conducting the experiments that take place in the European Columbus module. For that stays Maurer,

who tweets here
around six months on the ISS and will not return to Earth until April 2022. For Maurer, whose Facebook page you can find here, this is the first flight into space.

Plus:

Here you will find a list of all German astronauts and cosmonauts (including the astronauts from the GDR era).