ESA Astronaut André Kuipers at Sun City

ESA's next space-bound astronaut, André Kuipers, has spent most of the summer intensively training for his upcoming mission to the International Space Station with his crewmates Oleg Kononenko and Don Pettit. In the ISS the Dutch Astronaut will take part in ESA's fourth long duration mission.

His training takes place in all the ISS partners facilities: at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA and of course in the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre (GCTC) in Star City, not far from Moscow in Russia. This story notably shows the training with the Soyuz simulators.