SPACEWALK #1—A talk with Astronaut Hans Schlegel
February 11, 2008— European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel went to space to help deliver ESA’s Columbus Science lab. Now he’s the story. An undefined health issue forced mission managers to pull Schlegl from the first spacewalk, and to postpone that venture outside of the Shuttle and Station until Monday. Astronaut Stanley Love will step in for Schlegel to help veteran spacewalker Rex Walheim to outfit
Hans Schlegel’s presence on the mission is also a blast from the past for me. How long have been I been covering the “space beat”? Well, look at it this way, I covered Schlegel’s first shuttle mission, aboard
Since Atlantis’ current mission to the International Space Station is only Schlegel’s second spaceflight, I asked what he did with fifteen years of “down time”? Schlegl says he trained to fly a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and learned the Russian language in the process. “I learned a lot about myself, and my preconceptions of
Many thanks to everyone who tuned in for the three re-airings of my talk about “Final Countdown” on C-SPAN’s BookTV. If you’d like to get a copy, they’re available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, or Scientific American’s book club has an introductory offer for new members. The link for that is at…
More to come…
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