The work itself was satisfying in a way Schlegel had never experienced. It’s just like that big ship down there-we’re all in one boat.” It’s multinational here too, with different races. And then you realize we are in a small spaceship circling another spaceship. “You have that moment when you look out and say, ‘Gosh, that’s South Africa!’ And after that comes about 40 minutes of Pacific Ocean-40 minutes! Then South America for 20 minutes, then nothing but the Atlantic Ocean for 10 minutes, and then you’re back over South Africa. Like others who have made the journey, though, Schlegel will never forget how his parochialism disappeared in the rush of emotion that hit him when he first saw the intensely blue Earth set against the blackness of space. “But just before we got to orbit,” Schlegel recalls with a laugh, “I put my right foot a little bit ahead, so I was the sixth German in space and he was the seventh.” Another German payload specialist, Ulrich Walter, was on the same mission, and Schlegel and Walter sat beside each other during the launch. Five of his countrymen had preceded him into orbit by the time he served as a payload specialist on shuttle mission STS-55, a 10-day flight on which the astronauts conducted 88 experiments within the shuttle’s Spacelab science module. HANS SCHLEGEL, A GERMAN EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICIST, was very much aware of his national identity at the start of his first trip into space in 1993.
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