German astronaut Maurer landed on Earth


The astronaut Matthias Maurer was braked by four parachutes safely in the sea off the coast of Florida in the USA, as the space agency NASA announced. He and the rest of the crew – US astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Thomas Marshburn – had left the International Space Station around 24 hours earlier aboard a Crew Dragon capsule.

Maurer had been researching scientific experiments on the International Space Station ISS since November 2021 and also went out into space to work. The astronaut from the European space agency ESA was the twelfth German in the cosmos. He is expected back in Germany late Friday evening.

After the returnees had landed, ships with recovery teams set course for the approximately three-ton “Crew Dragon” space capsule of the private US company SpaceX. The ferry “Endurance” (Endurance) with the astronauts Maurer, Barron, Chari and Marshburn undocked from the ISS on Thursday. Three Russians, three Americans and one Italian are still working at the outpost of humanity around 400 kilometers above the earth.

During his 177-day mission called “Cosmic Kiss”, Mauer was involved in more than 100 experiments, 34 of them from Germany, said CEO Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). “The results will help us to better understand terrestrial problems in areas such as biology, medicine and materials science.”

“Welcome home,” wrote Europe’s space chief Josef Aschbacher on Twitter. Volker Schmid, manager of the Maurer mission at DLR, spoke of an “enormous workload” that Maurer “mastered with flying colors”. The astronaut with a doctorate in materials science was the fourth German on the ISS.



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