Ground support

Day and night, a worldwide network of control centres supports the astronauts on the International Space Station. In Europe, operators at the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich, Germany, are the direct link to ESA astronauts in orbit. They are here to help him 24 hours a day, seven days a week − they know where everything in the Station is located and how everything works. Teams constantly adjust tasks to make sure that astronauts can complete their mission. 

Simultaneously, researchers on the ground could control and monitor experiments perform in the European Columbus laboratory from their offices. Dedicated connections with eight User Support and Operation Centres across Europe make this possible.

ESA astronaut missions are part of the larger International Space Station partnership and each astronaut spends time on experiments from other space agencies, maintaining the weightless research laboratory, as well as following a compulsory 90-minute exercise routine.

ESA astronaut's point of contact on Earth are Eurocoms, a communicator for astronauts on orbit – many astronauts have a Eurocom certificate and have been ‘on-console’ for colleagues while they were in space. 

Eurocoms are the eyes and ears of an astronaut on the ground, whose job is to be always available to answer questions and make sure the time in space is spent as efficiently and as comfortably as possible. They relay queries to the scientists who designed and built experiments, and consider new tasks from the astronaut’s perspective.

Other experts at the Columbus Control Centre constantly check the systems on Europe’s Columbus space laboratory, make sure it had power, proper ventilation, cooling and all experiment hardware is running as planned. The Columbus experts in Oberpfaffenhofen ensure astronauts can live and work comfortably in a laboratory flying at 28 800 km/h in one the harshest environments we have ever explored – space.