Deutsche im Weltall
Germans in Space
German ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter.
Photo: NASA
With glossary and links
New: Hans Schlegel returned to space on Feb. 7, 2008 to install the Columbus space lab at the ISS. Earlier, Germans and other Europeans contributed to the 2006 Space Station mission and the 2004 Cassini-Huygens Saturn misson. See more below.
You may remember that German astronauts have been on board some recent NASA space shuttle missions, including the 3-D earth-mapping mission in February 2000 and the ISS mission in 2006. But do you know who the first German in space was? Well, neither do most Germans. But it happened in 1978 and the answer is in our "Chronik der Deutschen im Weltall".
With 46-year-old Dr. Gerhard P.J. Thiele on board the Raumfähre Endeavour for NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mapping Mission (SRTM) in February 2000, we introduced our Air & Space Travel Glossary. Below you'll find some background information about Germans in space and links to related vocabulary and German-language (and English) Web sites.
Most people know that both the Russian and the American space programs would never have gotten off the ground as quickly as they did without the talents of the German rocket scientists they imported from occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War. (Wernher von Braun on the U.S. side is probably the most famous.) So it seems only fair that both the Russians and the Americans have invited Germans (and the Swiss Claude Nicolier) to participate in their space missions over the years.
Cassini-Huygens 2004
The 2004 Cassini-Huygens space probe of the Saturnian system by NASA/ESA was a truly international project, with contributions by French, Italian, German, and other European countries. The Germans contributed the Doppler Wind Experiment (DWE) designed to determine the direction and magnitude of the winds in the atmosphere of the moon Titan. That prime science objective was derived from the Doppler shift of the Probe Relay Link signal from the Huygens probe (ESA) to the Cassini orbiter (NASA). More: Cassini-Huygens Web site (NASA/JPL).
The latest, European Space Agency (ESA) German astronaut in space is Hans Schlegel, who on his second trip with NASA is installing the Columbus space lab module aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Schlegel was a crew member aboard the Atlantis space shuttle launched on Feb. 7, 2008. His first space trip was in 1993 aboard Columbia. Schlegel, a former paratrooper, is from Aachen, Germany and has seven children with his wife Heike, a former pilot and astronaut.
Thomas Reiter (born in Frankfurt am Main in 1958), flew aboard the STS-121 mission to the ISS in 2006. Previously, the German astronaut had flown for six months aboard the Russian Mir space station. Reiter flew aboard Discovery on July 4, 2006 from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, docking with the International Space Station on July 6, 2006. After about six months aboard the station, he was replaced by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams in December 2006 when he returned to Earth.
Gerhard Thiele was born in Germany on September 2, 1953. Thiele is married and has four children. A trained physicist, he began working for the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, the German Aerospace Center) and undergoing astronaut training in 1988. He joined the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1998 after going through NASA's Astronaut Candidate Training program at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
In addition to a German astronaut, the technology on board the SRTM mission was also German. The 3-D mapping flight was a cooperative project of NASA, NIMA (National Imagery and Mapping Agency (USA), the DLR, and the ASI (Italian Space Agency). NASA was responsible for the development of the so-called C-band radar interferometer system. The German company Dornier Satellitensysteme GmbH (part of DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (Dasa, Munich) was the main contractor for the X-SAR radar system used on the mission.
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