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This was not what Matthias Maurer was expecting when he enrolled in a sea survival training with Chinese astronauts.
"It was so nice and relaxed," says the German astronaut of the European Space Agency (Esa). "I was floating there in the life raft, looking up at the sky – I only needed music and that would have given me a real vacation feeling in Hawaii."
The exercise took place last year in a newly built training center near the coastal city of Yantai, about an hour's flight southeast of Beijing. For two weeks, Maurer and fellow Astronaut Esa Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti lived and worked alongside their Chinese counterparts.
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"We trained together, we stayed in the same building as the Chinese astronauts, we shared the same food and it was a pretty intense experience," says Maurer. "I had the impression of being part of a family – it was completely different to be in Houston, where I rented an apartment and only saw my colleagues during a meeting. two or three hours training.
While other space agencies are organizing special team building exercises to help astronauts work together, the Chinese have taken a more fundamental approach.
"Chinese astronauts even spend their holidays together, they know each other very well and are like brothers and sisters," says Maurer. "When we lived there, we felt so warmly accepted in their family."
The Chinese spacecraft Shenzou, which carried an astronaut (or Taikonaut as it is called) into orbit in 2003, is designed for a crew of three. It is based on Russian Soyuz spacecraft technology and looks similarly disconcerting. But Soyuz has been piloting astronauts for 50 years and is designed around a rocket that first saw the light of day at the dawn of the space age. The Shenzu is much more 21st century.
"I was surprised by the dimensions," says Maurer. "It has a larger diameter than the Soyuz capsule and it is much higher – they have looked well at Russian material, they have learned what are the good parts and have looked at what they can improve."
There is so much room, we even had inflatable boats, which we do not have in the Soyuz – Matthias Maurer
If the space capsule splashes at sea, for example, the design of the Shenzou makes the whole experience of the exchange of space suits for survival suits before climbing on a floating space capsule much easier.
"There is so much room, we even had inflatable inflatable boats, which we do not have in the Soyuz," he says. "With survival training in the Russian Sea, you jump into the water, there is no boat – it is very cold and it is much, much more difficult."
Maurer has just qualified as an astronaut but, in his previous role at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany, he began to build links with the once-secret Chinese human space program in 2012. He visited their training center in Beijing a year later. installations and simulators. And, in 2016, a Chinese astronaut participated in one of Esa's regular spelunking expeditions.
With Cristoforetti and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, Maurer also learned Mandarin. "It's good but you have to improve it," he admits. Although, he tells me, his name in Chinese translates as "Horse of Heaven".
The United States will not approve cooperation with China in space – even on the International Space Station (ISS). But Esa keeps her options open when it comes to bringing her astronauts into orbit and beyond.
China is about to launch its first space station by 2023, and the country's robotic mission will be launched later this year at the other end of the moon. Esa decided to maintain its ties with America and Russia while associating with a new space the superpower would seem a canny move.
"Esa is already a cooperation between 23 member states, so we know what it takes to get the partners together," says Maurer. "We speak several languages, we have this intercultural awareness and we are the perfect glue to bring China into this great international space family."
I have the impression that any country in the world that wants to fly an astronaut can contact the Chinese through the UN and potentially go into space – Matthias Maurer
China recently signed an agreement with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs to open its new space station for international research. This could also extend to flying astronauts, in much the same way as the Soviet Intercosmos program of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw astronauts from allied countries – including Mongolia, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Syria – fly to Russian space stations.
"My impression is that any country in the world that wants to fly an astronaut can contact the Chinese through the UN and potentially go into space," says Maurer. "It's not just the Europeans, but the developing countries of the world who might not have an astronaut program at the moment."
Europe is ahead of the game and, in the coming months, Esa astronauts will begin to train in the Chinese capsule, hoping that one of them will be on the map. between them will obtain co-pilot position for a future mission.
"In the Soyuz, the left seat is the co-pilot, so we went to China and said we had to negotiate hard to make sure we had that seat on the left," Maurer says. "And they said – oh, okay, no problem … and we thought it was too easy … until we realized [in the Shenzou] the seat on the right is the co-pilot. "
Maurer hopes to make his first space flight to the ISS in 2020. After that, he will be well positioned to become one of the first foreign astronauts to fly alongside the Taikonauts at the Chinese station around 2023.
Partly because of the diplomatic policies of the current US administration, NASA should not soon begin to cooperate openly with the Chinese space program. In the longer term, however, with America and China considering a return to the Moon and ultimately the human exploration of Mars, the question is whether the space powers will continue to compete or if they will eventually have to work together).
"Once we look beyond the Earth or the Moon, we need all the partners we can find on this planet because it becomes harder, more expensive and we need the best technology." "We aim to bring the Chinese into the family and into a future lunar research station – the more we have in the family, the better we will become."
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