Andre Kuipers pays a surprise visit to Social Space Credit: DLR/ESA/A. Morellon (CC-BY 3.0)
ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers tweeted and visited at #SocialSpace. The Dutchman said “I didn’t believe in Twitter at the beginning and had to be convinced to use it on the ISS. I thought ‘I don’t care if someone is going shopping’.
“Then when I started I realised there was more than one way of using it. I started with only a few thousand followers and it went up to a quarter of a million.”
@astro_andre had a slightly longer mission than planned because of a capsule problem, but said his only regret about being informed of the delay was missing his son’s birthday back on the ground.
“Then I thought about how many more great things I could do staying up there. If they had wanted me to stay even longer I wouldn’t have minded.”
Reflecting on his ISS mission, Andre Kuipers said there were many amazing experiences, but the highlight was probably using Canadarm2 to manoeuvre the Dragon capsule in for docking.
“The arm is one of the most difficult pieces of training you have to go through so it was great to use it, ” he said. “It was easier on the day than in the simulations. That was my operational highlight – when you train so hard and then you finally do the thing, it is really great.”
Discussion: no comments