Et was a decision that many had been awaiting with some impatience: by selecting its astronaut class in 2022, would ESA finally give the first German woman the opportunity to fly into space? The answer came a little late this Wednesday afternoon and was disappointing for Germany. From almost 23,000 applications, five “career astronauts” were selected who will begin their training next year, eleven reserve astronauts who will be available for later missions, and one “parastronaut”, an astronaut with a physical disability.
In fact, two German women are among the selected, but only in the reserve team: the industry-experienced biologist Amelie Schoenenwald and the pilot Nicola Winter. Sophie Adenot from France, Pablo Álvarez Fernández from Spain, Rosemary Coogan from the United Kingdom, Raphaël Liégeois from Belgium and Marco Sieber from Switzerland have been appointed career astronauts. In addition to the two Germans, the reserve team includes a Brit, two Italians, a Spaniard, an Austrian, a Frenchman, a Czech, a Pole and a Swede.
Almost 50 percent of the candidates are female – a quota with which the ESA is finally joining NASA, which attaches great importance to equality and diversity. In NASA’s current astronaut corps, almost 40 percent are women. At ESA, on the other hand, there is only one of the currently active astronauts with the Italian Samantha Cristoforetti.
The first “Parastronaut”
In addition, a “parastronaut”, an astronaut candidate with a physical disability, was selected for the first time. This call for applications was an international premiere, which on the one hand should increase the pool of talented candidates in terms of diversity and on the other hand contribute to understanding the behavior of people with disabilities in space. The tender was aimed at people with disabilities in the lower extremities, people with legs of different lengths or a height of less than 130 centimeters.
257 applications were received. British physician John McFall, who was eventually selected, had a motorcycle accident at the age of 19, which resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Five years later he had entered competitive sport, representing the UK in international competitions as a sprinter.
The fact that it will probably still be some time before the first German flies into space makes Germany appear strangely antiquated in international comparison. Twelve Germans have been in space so far, which means that Germany ranks fifth internationally in terms of the number of astronauts after the USA, Russia, China and Japan – but there is not a single woman in this group. Among the major space nations that have sent more than two people into orbit, Germany is alone with this record.
Project “The Astronaut”
For the engineer Claudia Kessler, that was reason enough in 2016 to set up her own project, called “The Astronaut”, to send the first German woman into space. In this private project financed by donations, too, there was a multi-stage selection process that finally reduced a pool of 400 applicants to two women who were to be trained as astronauts completely independently of ESA for 30 to 50 million euros. The aim was to enable one of the two to stay on the ISS.
Initially, the meteorologist Insa Thiele-Eich and the pilot Nicola Winter were announced as finalists. The latter resigned in 2018 and was replaced by astrophysicist Suzanna Randall. The announced space flight was originally supposed to take place before 2020, but ongoing financing problems now make the project very unlikely to be successful.
It would have been extremely gratifying if ESA, with its selection, had taken on the assignment of the first German female astronaut in the near future. Nevertheless, there is a connection between the ESA selection and the “The Astronaut” project: Nicola Winter, who had dropped out of the “The Astronaut” project, has now made it into the reserve corps of the ESA.
The selected full-time astronauts will now be contracted directly by ESA and will begin training next year. Initially, this will be basic training lasting a little over a year at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne, which will then transition into increasingly specialized mission training once a specific mission has been assigned.
First of all, as announced by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, there will be a media marathon for the new astronaut candidates: “They will be very busy giving interviews and interacting with the public in a variety of ways.” In the meantime, the two Germans will be able to continue to devote themselves to their careers outside of ESA – for German space travel and in particular its recruitment of female offspring, this is a missed opportunity and extremely regrettable.