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, were the direct link to ESA astronaut Tim Peake when he was in orbit. They were there 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 adjusted tasks to make sure that Tim could complete his mission.

Simultaneously, researchers on the ground can control and monitor experiments performed 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.

Tim’s point of contact on Earth was a Eurocom, a communicator for astronauts on orbit – Tim himself has a Eurocom certificate and has 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.

"I have a huge respect for the ground control teams and everything they do for our missions. Working side by side with them on console has been an invaluable experience." Tim Peake

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