“Amazingly, my colleagues and I, we are all extremely calm, very relaxed,” said Maurer on Friday at a press conference he attended from quarantine in Cape Canaveral. “I have to pinch myself every day because I think I would have expected more, that I am totally jittery and nervous.”
This condition is also a “success of the training”, said the 51-year-old Saarlander. “We know exactly what to expect, we are totally focused, we work through the procedures and I think the excitement will set in at the latest when the rocket is detonated.”
Together with his three NASA colleagues Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, he entered the “Crew Dragon” capsule erected on the tip of the rocket for the first time on Thursday evening (local time). “That was a moment when I thought it was getting really real.” Otherwise, there is also a lot of program on the plan in quarantine. “We don’t just sit around here and protect ourselves from the germs, we also do various exercises and go through the process again until the start.”
Maurer and his three colleagues are supposed to take off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport and fly to the ISS on Sunday with a “Crew Dragon” from the private space company SpaceX owned by Elon Musk. Maurer would be the twelfth German in space, the fourth on the ISS and the first to fly there in a “Crew Dragon”. On the ISS, Maurer will carry out numerous experiments for about six months at an altitude of around 400 kilometers and will probably also complete an outdoor assignment.