Space travel: Rocket launched to ISS with first Turkish astronaut

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This was announced by the American space company Axiom Space, which is organizing the commercial mission. In addition to the Turkish air force pilot Alper Gezeravci, the Swedish astronaut Marcus Wandt, the Italian Walter Villadei and the American Spaniard Michael Lopez-Alegria are also on board. They will reach the ISS on Saturday.

Gezeravci is the first Turk in space. The mission therefore generates great interest in Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who participated with the air force pilot in last year’s election campaign before his re-election, celebrated the mission as a “new symbol of a growing, stronger and more confident Turkey.”

Gezeravci is aware of the high expectations. In his own words, he is willing to “take the dreams of the Turkish people into the depths of space.” In an interview with the Anadolu news agency, he emphasized that the flight to the ISS was “not an end in itself” for his country. Rather, it serves to “achieve the objectives of our space research.”

The 14-day Ax-3 mission is organized by Axiom Space in collaboration with the American space agency NASA. Lopez-Alegria is Axiom’s chief astronaut. The former NASA astronaut has both Spanish and American citizenship.

The Swede Wandt, who was sent to the ISS by the European Space Agency (ESA), will complete 20 experiments during his two-week stay in space and will also maintain the experiment hardware on board the International Space Station, as the German Aerospace space center (DLR) in Cologne announced. It is therefore “the first time that an ESA astronaut has been booked for a commercial mission by the American launch service provider Axiom”.

According to information, German research institutes are involved in ten of Wandt’s twenty experiments. In addition to the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine, the DLR Institute of Materials Physics in Space and the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, these include the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, the Berlin Charité and the universities of Giessen, Greifswald and Kiel and the Research Institute Access from Aachen.

This includes a new voice assistant for astronauts that is equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the effects of a space mission on people’s bones, cardiovascular system and brain, as well as possible air pollution in the ISS.

The rocket’s launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but was postponed by a day at short notice. High-tech billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, which is supplying the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon space capsule for the mission, said the “extra time” until launch was needed to conduct testing and data analysis.

(SDA)

Source:Blick