Space travel: A personal view from above

Abstract

Spaceflight has become an integral part of our daily life, much more than most citizens might recognize-almost every day we are using multiple space-based services, like navigation, live-transmissions from all over the planet, and products that are based on the data from Earth observing satellites. Even more, the conditions of space provide unique conditions for research in a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines. In space we are not only expanding our knowledge in all these disciplines, but are developing new technologies and applications. This is especially true for the domain of human space flight. Since almost 20 years astronauts are conducting experiments on board the international spacestation ISS on behalf of scientific teams from over 100 countries on this planet.