Global Courant 2023-05-18 19:15:42
HOUSTON, USA
While Turkey’s first space traveler candidates Alper Gezeravcı and Tuva Cihangir Atasever talk about their education and projects after the space program in America, one of them plans to establish a sustainable space ecosystem in their own country.
At TEKNOFEST, a major technology event held in Istanbul last month, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Turkey has chosen Gezeravcı and Atasever as the country’s first space travelers to be sent into space in the last quarter of 2023.
Turkish Industry and Technology Minister Mustafa Varank also closely follows his training at the Houston Space Center in Taxes state.
Turkish Air Force pilot Gezeravcı said that the application process for space travel to Anatolia at the space center was a coincidence.
He said he learned about the 42-year-old Turkish president’s statement that the first Turkish person would be sent into space, after returning from the plane at midnight.
“The next morning, after seeing parts of the same content on the news, I examined the detailed criteria on the Turkish Space Agency’s website,” he said. Gezeravcı said that he decided to apply for the program after evaluating that he met the criteria.
He said that he did not share the good news from Ahmet Yozgatlıgil, the Vice President of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), that he was elected to office, due to confidentiality.
Gezeravcı said that the training process that started in Houston continues at stations in different states.
Planned to stay in space for 14 days
Pointing out that the space mission is planned to be carried out in the last quarter of this year, Gezeravcı said that a clear timetable will emerge soon.
“We have 6 months ahead of us. It’s 6 months, there’s a lot of training content, so we won’t even realize how fast the training period has passed.”
He said that the space mission will be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and will stay in space for 14 days with the experiments chosen by TÜBİTAK during this training.
Expressing his excitement at being chosen as one of Turkey’s first prospective space travelers, he said, “It is a first in our history.”
Hailing Turkey’s “will” as a step that will “raise the self-confidence of a generation whose dreams have so far been limited to airplanes flying in the sky”, Erdogan said the space program will “take the threshold of dreams beyond space”. visible sky.”
My expectation is that this first step we will take will be a starting step in our history that we will be proud of from now on, and that our country will take its deserved place as not only a participant but also a voice in larger space projects. The next period,” he added.
Turkish space program reserve candidate Tuva Cihangir Atasever, who works as a systems engineer in the field of space launch systems at Turkish missile manufacturer Roketsan, said that she first thought of space travel in 2014.
“My ultimate goal and desire is to go to the Moon,” he added. “Being part of a mission to the moon in low earth orbit was one of the logical steps.
Sustainable space ecosystem
Atasever said, “I had already decided to apply,” when the National Space Program announced that a Turkish space traveler would be selected, adding that he applied immediately when the application process started in May last year.
“The application process was quite long. We went through extremely intense and grueling tests and screening stages,” he said, adding that the whole process took about 10 months.
Saying, “I learned that I was elected on the day of the longest night,” Atasever added that he also received information about his election from Yozgatgil.
“It took me a while to fully understand at first,” she said after the conversation with him had ended.
It took a few hours for Atasever to realize that he had been selected. “I was very excited, of course very proud. It is both a pleasure and a pride to be a part of such a historic mission.”
Noting that they received mostly theoretical training from the moment they started their programs at the space center, Erdoğan said, “We are currently trying to digest the technical information, related subsystems and theoretical materials of the emergency scenarios of the vehicle we will launch in space.”
He added that their practical training will begin in the coming months.
We will be part of much more fun and exciting trainings in the coming months.” “We will travel to Germany, Japan, and Alabama (USA) for practice training on the subsystems and various modules of the International Space Station.”
We will receive training on the European Space Agency’s Columbus Module and the Japanese space agency’s Kibo Module. A much more exciting, intense, challenging but adventurous journey awaits us.”
Saying that two manned flights will be carried out within the scope of the Turkey Space Explorer and Science Mission, Atasever announced that one is the International Space Station and the other is a suborbital flight mission.
Explaining that the suborbital flight is expected to take place a few months after the International Space Station mission, Atasever said that since the suborbital flight is much shorter than the mission and does not reach Earth orbit, the total flight time of the spacecraft will be a few hours. .
“There is a psychological experience of change and transformation called the ‘review effect’ experienced by astronauts going into space,” he explained. “When they see the Earth from afar for the first time, they realize how fragile it is, that we are all teammates and crew members traveling in the same spaceship, and they enjoy the unique beauty of the world. The thing I am most curious about about space is actually Earth.”
Atasever plans to work for Turkey to create a sustainable space ecosystem and industry after the space mission.
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