Most people who are far from home seek to cultivate a piece of home away from home. Americans also celebrate Thanksgiving in Germany, and in times of globalization, German wholemeal bread can also be found in Tokyo. Matthias Maurer, 52, born in St. Wendel in Saarland, has now been a good 170 days quite far away from home, namely in the International Space Station ISS. This Friday at 7 a.m. Central European Time, he landed in a capsule off the coast of Florida.
First break: In the first three weeks on board the ISS, Matthias Mauerer has twice operated a robotic arm, received a docking module, slept in a brand new bed and had to change plans due to warnings about space debris.
(Photo: picture alliance/dpa/NASA)
Just as the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti inaugurated the first espresso machine on the ISS and brought a piece of Italy into space in 2015, Maurer also celebrated a piece of Saarland on the ISS. Several times even, which is well documented thanks to the astronaut’s numerous Twitter posts.
The experiment that Maurer, the twelfth German, but the first Saarlander in space, carried out around February 15, has to do with a topic that has traditionally been very important to the Saarlanders: building houses. Maurer tested the hardening of concrete mixtures in zero gravity. Although there is usually no weightlessness in Saarland, the cost of owning a home, as the Neue Deutsche Welle song puts it, is often “completely detached” from the actual planning.
At Easter, when the weather permitted, Maurer photographed the Saarland from above, which the news often has to serve as a size comparison when a forest fire is raging somewhere or an oil tanker has a leak. Saarbrücken, Saarschleife, Bostalsee, St. Wendeler Land. Four satellite images were enough to capture the small area, which is the only one in the world that can claim to be the same size as Saarland.
However, the high point of the mission was on December 8th. Maurer served his colleagues on the space station a Saarland menu: potato cream soup, venison ragout with dumplings, potatoes and bacon and rusty knights, which are known elsewhere as poor knights. You have to know that if there were a Saarland Basic Law, the first article would probably begin with the sentence “Main thing’ gudd’ gess’.
The main thing is to eat well, that applies to a Saarlander even if he has to pluck the meal out of space-worthy tin cans. Of course, the greatest achievement of Saarland’s high culture would have been to bring a so-called swivel on board the ISS, a three-legged frame made of stainless steel with a movable grill grate attached to a chain at the top. Mostly pork neck steaks, which are also called swivels, are on this grid. However, until now there has been insufficient scientific research into panning in weightlessness, so Maurer had to forego this piece of home for the time being. It is quite possible that he will be greeted with a snifter when he returns to Saarland as soon as he has landed.