Tourists on the International Space Station: Billionaires visited astronaut Maurer

Tourists on the International Space Station
Billionaires visited astronaut Maurer

06/09/2022 03:58 AM

Matthias Maurer spends six months on the International Space Station. After his return, he talks about a number of curiosities. So the host became in space twice: first a Russian, then an American mission docked with tourists.

Astronaut Matthias Maurer received two visits from tourists during his time on the International Space Station. Düsseldorf’s Saarlander newspaper reported at the Estateshouse meeting in the Rheinische Post that a Japanese billionaire and his assistant had roamed with a Russian expedition from Soyuz. After that, an American expedition docked with three other billionaires.

The 52-year-old said some of the visitors were much older than him. That’s why, despite his age, he still believes he has a chance of a possible lunar mission. Maurer revealed that staying in space for six months resulted not only in muscle but also in bone loss. He has ten percent of bone loss in the femur. Like muscle, bone can also be rebuilt through exercise.

Maurer pleaded to be more careful with the planet. From space, the atmosphere is thin. What is hard to fathom is the “aggressive handling of our atmosphere and environment”. In the end, Earth is “just a spacecraft with eight billion astronauts on it. It can only work if we stick together and maintain the foundation of life.”

Dirty socks stayed in space

Maurer returned to Earth in May after six months of weightlessness. His body had forgotten how to deal with gravity in space. Balance also suffered. For the first few days on Earth he felt like a drunken sailor.

Maurer said his soiled socks were not back on the floor. These burned when they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not always a meteor star, Maurer said, when you’re watching a glowing tail in the sky. He was the twelfth German in space. On the International Space Station, it orbited the Earth more than 2,800 times at an altitude of about 400 kilometers.