Covering New Ground

Like I said in my previous post, I left O.K.'s on the Sunday morning instead of Monday, and was going to tell you why in an extra post, which is this one you're currently reading about Monday, the 1st of September.

Sunrise on the 1st of September, as seen from my kitchen

For my birthday in March, my sister gave me not only the book about NASA which I have reviewed here, but also a visit with her to ESA (European Space Agency) in Darmstadt. (The post about my birthday is here.)

ESA's headquarters are in Paris, but Darmstadt in Germany is an important location as well. You can read about ESA as a whole on wikipedia here, and about its Darmstadt facilities here - and of course, ESA and its many facilities have their own official websites, too.

Neither my sister nor I had ever been to Darmstadt before, and we knew very little about the city. I booked our train tickets after we had found a slot for a guided tour on the 1st of September at 2:00 pm.

We arrived with about 40 minutes delay at Darmstadt's main train station, but of course being seasoned travellers by public transport, we had allowed plenty of time for just such a case, and weren't in any hurry to get to ESOC. Still, we walked the short distance from the station to the complex of buildings right away just to make sure we knew where it was, and then had a bit of a walk around Darmstadt, which admittedly we found rather uninspiring.

In contrast, the tour was great!! It was fascinating to see the places and props I had read about so much for many years, and it was equally fascinating to see my sister's curiosity and interest in everything - so far, she had never been much interested in anything to do with space, satellites, astronomy and so on, so this was really new ground for her in more than one sense. Her enthusiasm enhanced my own experience of the tour, plus we had a very good guide; he knew his stuff but did not flood us with a monotonous stream of facts and numbers. Instead, he explained things in a way everyone was able to follow, and showed us around the grounds and some of the buildings.

Wall clock outside mission control, showing GMT (it was 15:08:53 on our watches and phones)

Model of Europe's Ariane launcher

Model of the ISS suspended in a staircase

German astronaut Alexander Gerst welcomes all visitors (...and shows them the way to the toilet) ! :-)

I loved the flags of all ESA-participating nations on top of the main ESOC building

We were even allowed to look into the main mission control room, although the glass doors were closed for us; a simulation was going on and of course visitors would only disturb the important process of preparing for all sorts of issues that can happen during a satellite flight or probe's mission in space.

One and a half hours later, we left ESOC and walked back into town centre in search of food, and found an Italian place where we had a very late and welcome lunch. 

After that, we walked on and up a long, slight hill to a quarter of town called Mathildenhöhe ("Mathilda Heights"), famous for its beautiful architecture from the Art Nouveau era, called Jugendstil here (clicking on the word will take you to its wikipedia entry, where you'll see photos of some of the same places that we saw and which I am showing you here.

"Wedding Tower"

Angels guarding a golden door

We would have loved to have more time here - just walking among the gorgeous buildings for a couple of hours would have been nice, but we had to make do with a rather short glimpse before it was time to head back to the station, which took us little more than half an hour, I think.

Sunset at Esslingen train station where we had to change

Our trains home were on time, and we said good night happy to have had such a great day out together, loosely planning on a future trip to Darmstadt with a longer visit of Mathildenhöhe.