Last month, our dear friend, Erin, came all the way to Köln go visit us after a greuling 14 hour interview in Heidelberg (Yes she got the job!!). She is the reason why Ax and I are in Europe in the first place as she had done the ISU summer program (called SSP for more acronym lingo) in 2006 and came back a full blown space geek.

So being surrounded by space cadets meant a day of space for us! We went to axel's awesome job to check out the European astronaut centre! This is THE training center for all European astronauts, training that is a minimum of 4 years with various exercises like learning how to fix something in space by mimicking Zero gravity in a ten meter deep pool. Most parts of the international space station has been made to a 1:1 scale (not all though, because the whole thing is the size of 2 football fields) and astronauts practice orientation and experiments in them. There is a simulator for the Russian mobile that took our own Bob Thirsk up just last month which they practice take off and landing. All of the experiments have their own rooms for practicing the experiments. A fellow canadian and isu alum, Jason, who coincidentally had a wife who just had a baby a couple of weeks ago, walked us through all of the modules and was still thrilled by it all. But this was not the coolest part.

In the storage room of ISS:


Erin, Jason and I:


On one of the exercise machines, trying to look like I'm defying gravity:


Axel pretending to do an experiment:



Jason and Erin in the EAS lobby:



Stewart, yet another Canadian (from Newfoundland) and isu alum, showed
us his area-the control room!!! Most of us reference "Houston" from
the Apollo 13 movie as the control room but in reality it is just the
main one. Europe has two-one in Munich and this one! Russia also has
one but is segregated from the rest. We lucked out because Stewart was
around to show it all to us. The astronauts were sleeping so we
couldn't see them but we saw all of the camera views of the iss of
earth! Wow. It is pretty amazing to see our planet from far away. He
showed us the astronauts' extremely packed schedule (in 5 min
increments!) and all of the things they monitor to ensure all is safe
on board. What was really impressive was the enormity of the planning
and monitoring of 6 people just above our heads. And the sacrifices
these people are making for the advancement of human knowledge of
space and in reality, our own planet. I didn't really get excited
about it until I had seen how many people are really involved in this
cause. And how Stewart and Jason still get excited about what they do.


Here we are in the control room...in the background you can see a feed of "Houston", the main control room.


Erin then got treated to another typical Köln day when we have
visitors - pouring rain. To add to the desolate city feel, it was yet
another holiday in germany so nothing was open. I think we now know
that for next time we tell people to bring an umbrella and make sure
not to come when it's an important day for Jesus.