Fancy being an Astronaut, ESA is recruiting
 

See

https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_R..._31_March_2021

Excellent news!! There I was thinking that being an old has-been retired pilot with fading eyesight was a bar to my dreams of being an astronaut but no longer.

The only obstacle might be being a bloke, but I only need to self-declare myself as female and ‘Robert is your Dad’s brother’. Worked for Eddie Izzard (recently voted as I understand ‘best female comedian’).

I doubt they'll be taking many Brits..................

Canada is an associate member too. ESA is independent so shouldn’t hold a grudge against us...!

I think that you can now self identify as an astronaut rather than do all those tedious tests. I think we have come a long way from the Mercury Seven...

Got a buddy works for ESA, she reckons it's a place where national politics get firmly left at the door, which is good to hear. And on the astronaut JO, there will almost certainly be Brits involved in the selection process.

She doesn't work at ESTEC then? To be fair, some of the Brits working there were the worst offenders.

Both are correct. I have been working with ESA (and ESTEC in particular) since early 90's on joint international projects and visited ESTEC every 2-3 months sometimes. ESTEC is indeed a nice place where many nationalities work in a friendly atmosphere. To a large extent this is because The Netherlands, as a host country, is very comfortable for foreigners.
I recall only one funny episode: going through a long corridor I noticed a hand-written plate on one office saying "only fans of Celtic work here" (I assume it was about football). I asked my ESTEC friend whether it was a joke, and he answered: "50/50, really tough guys inside and you'd better not discuss sport issues with them" :-)

As for UK astronauts, ESA works according to a so-called "geographic return" principle. It implies that funding of the industrial contractors from a particular country should be balanced with the budget that this country allocates to ESA. The same for the number of staff. In 90's there were times when the UK decreased its funding and the number of British engineers and scientists also decreased. Accordingly, when ESA started sending astronauts to space, there were surprisingly nearly no one from the UK (France and Germany prevailed). Only in the last 10-15 years the situation improved.

No she's been at ESOC last couple of years - speaks very highly of it, thirty nationalities or something similar.

I recall a couple of the local Dutch hoteliers were less than friendly to any visiting German staff. I believe their gripe was about their ongoing dominance in football and something about some war or other. Of course we Brits never even thought about that stuff, let alone raise it in conversation ;)

Ah yes, Juste Retour. Many a happy debate about that too. Again I recall the UK did quite well out of that over the years.

No good for BV though, he'd want to take his own bog along for the trip ;)

UK eschewed manned space flight in favour of science and earth observation for a long time. Now they are back in and funding it there will be a % of Brits selected. One memory of ESTEC was having lunch in the canteen and everyone spoke in their own language and everyone else understood, apart from me!

One of my memories of the first visit to ESTEC was a shocking surprise that so many people there spoke relatively poor English. At least, worse than I expected. Especially in terms of pronunciation. Many French and Italian guys just did not care about it (though their written papers were quite good), and it was a bit stressful until I got used to such “variations”. Poor Great English language, which I loved to study at school. A flip side of being a means of international communications

I wonder what the chances are of ever making it into orbit.

Clearly I’m suitably qualified.

However I’m not prepared to go until they fit doors which go “shhh” and I have a machine which responds to “tea Earl Grey hot”.

Make it so.

Of course.
 

And my own shower Nutloose. Standards, dear boy. Standards.

BV

:E

..............

It will probably just produce a brown liquid that tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Indeed, if you can believe the story, they were personally responsible for shutting down the female astronaut program.