06. Die Astronautin - Suzanna Randall

Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast. Stories from the cosmos of paragliding. Today with Susanna

Randall and

Lucian Haas on the mic.

The Astronaut. That's the name of a private initiative that wants to send a woman from Germany into space for the first time using sponsorship funds. There have already been several male astronauts from Germany—eleven, to be exact, most recently Alexander Gerst. When it comes to German female astronauts, the count is still zero. That is set to change in the future. And that's what this episode of Podz-Glidz is about. What does space travel have to do with paragliding? Well, one of the two candidates selected by the initiative, who is already in the middle of training, is Susanna Randall. Susanna is an astronomer and knows her way around the stars. At the same time, she has also been paragliding for over ten years. And she does it with great enthusiasm. For a podcast with the subtitle "Stories from the Cosmos of Paragliding," it's only natural to take a closer look at the connection between space travel and paragliding in the person of Susanna Randall.

In the following brief forty-five minutes, the 38-year-old talks about the background of her space travel plans. We discuss, among other things, dealing with the risk of a rocket launch—and a paragliding launch. It's about fear as well as the strong urge to soar above everything. Additionally, we look at the prospect of potentially giving paragliding a certain celebrity status as the first German astronaut.

Susanna, you could become Germany's first woman in space. What does that feel like?

Yes, exactly. So, I'm currently in training for the "Die Astronautin" project. And our goal is simply to get the first German woman into space. Many people don't even know this, but Germany has had eleven men in space so far and not a single woman. And of course, we want to change that with "Die Astronautin." There are two of us now, and we're both training. That means it's not entirely certain yet which one of us will fly. But of course, for now, it's an exciting feeling. Also a lot of work. I have to train a lot, obviously. But yeah, it's a huge honor when I think about the fact that I could represent Germany as a woman in space when the time comes.

But how did it all start? What drove you to want to become an astronaut?

For me, I think it's like for so many children. It's always been my dream. I mean, as a kid, I was always looking at the stars. I collected everything that had anything to do with space travel. I looked up to Sally Ride. She was the first American woman in space. I thought she was just, just amazing. I also thought she looked a bit like me. And from then on, I basically always wanted to fly into space. I told everyone about it my whole youth. I'm going to be the first woman on Mars. That was my goal back then. And eventually, you get older and more realistic. And then I thought, okay, that's probably not going to happen. It's rather unlikely. So I became an astronaut and chose astronomy out of love for space. But I think this desire to discover something new and explore other spheres is very pronounced in most children.

And I think for me, that wish just... it simply never left me.

So you're saying you're training right now. But how certain is it actually at the moment that you'll really ever fly into space?

You just don't know right now. That makes it kind of even more exciting. Sure, if you're an ESA astronaut, you train knowing you'll most likely be assigned a mission. That's not the case for us. So, as I said, there are two of us. That means even if we get the money together and the mission happens, the chance for me is always only 50 percent, because only one of us will fly. And at the moment, we're also still working on the funding. So right now, it looks very good. I can't reveal any more. But we now have concrete proposals for a mission. It should take place at the end of 2020. Well, that can of course be pushed back a few months. But we really have this proposal now and we're currently working very closely with the politicians as well to be able to realize the mission.

Tell me a bit more about the background, since you just mentioned the ESA. But you're saying it's not an ESA mission, so ESA, the European Space Agency. And with you, it sounds like we still need money, as if this were all a private pleasure. How should the background of that be seen? I mean,

It really is a private project. The astronaut was conceived by Claudia Kessler. Claudia has been working in the space industry for decades. And she's been looking at this for the last few decades and said, it can't be that in 2019 we still haven't had a German woman in space. And through the ESA calls for applications, which happen about every ten to 15 years, no German woman has been selected so far. So of course we've had Alexander Gerst in space, who does a great job. I'm a huge Alexander Gerst fan. But we're missing that female role model for the girls. And the ESA has just trained a new male German astronaut again. He'll probably be the next ESA astronaut in space, Matthias Maurer.

But that's not a woman. And then Claudia said, okay, we just need this private initiative, this push, this proactive approach to actually get a German woman into space. And yes, it is a one hundred percent private initiative. We want to finance ourselves with the help of investors, but we also hope to get the politicians on our side and that they will support us as well.

And can you just buy your way into space as a private initiative? Can you just buy a ticket to the ISS?

That's pretty much how it's going to work, sure. Of course, it's good if you have the right connections. I mean, we also work with the DLR at times. Claudia is, of course, very well-connected in the space industry. But theoretically, anyone who has the necessary small change—and by small change, I mean about 50 million euros—can go to the providers. At the moment, those are the Russians, of course, who send people to the ISS with the Soyuz. In the next few months, SpaceX and Boeing will also enter the market. Those are two commercial American providers. And you can just go to them and say, hey, here's 50 million. I want to go to space. And well, you'll probably have to negotiate with them a bit. You also have to go through the training, of course. You have to be suitable.

But in principle, it's possible. I mean, there have been space tourists in the past. I believe we've had seven space tourists so far, all of whom flew up with the Russians. And they did it the exact same way. They simply paid their way in. They had to pass medical tests, of course, pass psychological tests, do some basic training. And then they were able to just fly into space.

And you say you have to train as an astronaut now. What does the basic training involve? What do you have to be able to do for that?

Yes, it involves all sorts of things. Our goal as astronauts is that we don't want to be space tourists; we want to do scientific research up there too. Naturally, on the female body, because there is very, very little data available in Europe, as we've only had three European female astronauts until now. That means, from a medical perspective, it's definitely very, very interesting. We also have these role model functions, especially now within Germany, but also across Europe. And it's very important that we put the natural sciences, the technology, all of that in the foreground. So we're not there just to have fun and take photos, but we really want to make a difference. We want to show that natural sciences, physics—that's cool. In space, you naturally have completely different possibilities for inspiring children and young people about physics than you do here on Earth.

So that's really important to us. And that's why our training isn't just this basic survival training, so to speak—which buttons I'm allowed to press and which I'm not. We also have to really understand how the experimental facilities work, for example. We'll also have mission-specific training on which experiments we have to carry out. The basic training at the moment is mixed. We do a lot of theory. Most people forget that. They think I'm running from one survival training to the next. Unfortunately, that's not the case. We have a lot of theory, of course. I have to learn, for example, how the thermal cycle on the ISS works? How is the air recycled, and so on? But we also do practical things. For example, I'm currently getting my pilot's license. I've been paragliding since 2008.

And this summer, I was lucky enough to be able to get my private pilot license for small aircraft. I'm almost finished with that now. Then we did parabolic flights. Those are the flights where you experience weightlessness for a few seconds. And now next week in Bremen, we'll have practical training on a mockup of the Columbus module. That means we'll actually see what the computer stations look like. We'll log in there. So, everything is in simulation, of course. And just see how it works if I were on the ISS right now? What things would I have to do to make it all work?

You just mentioned paragliding, which you've been doing since 2008. Did that have anything to do with your further career, in the sense that you'd say it was a step that was necessary somewhere, that maybe it's how I eventually got the idea to actually do this with these astronauts?

Well, I don't know if paragliding specifically prepared me to be an astronaut. Probably not. I think it's more of a character trait—that I've always wanted to try something new, that I'm perhaps willing to take the risks involved in paragliding, which are also involved in space missions. I've always wanted to reach for the stars. I've always wanted to see the world from above. Maybe that's where you see the parallels. Of course, you get much higher in spaceflight than in paragliding. But yeah, I think it's simply this curiosity, also the will to see the world from a different perspective, which you have both in paragliding and now in the space mission.

Did your paragliding and the knowledge of it, like how to fly and all that, help you in any way during the application process—like them saying, "Wow, at least she can already paraglide, so she might be better at dealing with other things involving aircraft or something like that"?

I don't know at all if that was a factor in the decision. I think, above all, they wanted to see that you're a bit of a risk-taker, that you dare to try new things, that you can assess yourself personally, can make quick decisions, and so on. And paragliding definitely plays a role there. So it was quite funny. In the second round of the application process—it was split into several rounds—there were six of us women left, so a subgroup of the women who were still remaining. And three of them did paragliding. So it was really that out of six women, three were paragliders and the other three were already pilots. So I do think that simply being able to navigate in the air, in three-dimensional space, and having that inclination, played a role.

Well, you also have another job. What do you do there?

Exactly, I'm an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, at the ESO. And that is still actually my main job. I'm an astronomer there. First, I work for the ALMA telescope. That's the largest millimeter telescope in the world. It's made up of so many—well, 66 antennas. It's located down in Chile in the Atacama Desert. I actually just came from there. I was down there a week ago. And well, we explore the cold universe with it, as we always say. So we don't see the stars that shine brightly with it; instead, with ALMA, which observes in the millimeter wavelength range, we see, for example, the dust clouds around the stars. So the invisible things, really.

So it's a so-called radio telescope?

Yes, it's often referred to as a radio telescope. That's not entirely correct. It's between the visible spectrum and the radio spectrum. So, with our eyes, we see very short-wave radiation. Radio radiation is very long-wave. And the millimeter range, which ALMA observes, is somewhere in between. But optically, it looks more like a radio telescope. So, it's these satellite dishes rather than the mirrors you know from classical optical telescopes.

If you look at that now, you already said very early on that you wanted to become an astronomer, you were always looking out, wanted to go to Mars and stuff like that. So, in your life, it always pulls you, I'd say, upwards. At least from the perspective of Earth. Where does that come from?

I don't know. I have no idea.

So what I find fascinating about paragliding, what particularly fascinates me about it, is really this seeing the world from above and simply getting out of a small world. So when you fly, whether it's in a plane or paragliding or even in space, you just don't see that little corner anymore where you sit with your house, but when paragliding, you see the whole city. So you fly over the city. You have an overview. Well, from space you probably see all of Germany. But simply getting out of the familiar and getting a new perspective, I think that's what has always fascinated me. With paragliding, of course, there's also this experience in nature. So I always find that fascinating. So one of my favorite variants of paragliding is also hike and fly, where you hike up the mountain, just unpack a light glider, and then glide down.

And then it actually almost doesn't matter if you catch a crazy amount of thermals. You still had a great experience in nature.

Anyone who flies high can also fall deep. How do you deal with the risk of flying? Is it always there in the back of your mind, or is it something you just push aside?

Yeah, well, I think with paragliding, at the very beginning of my training, probably like for most people, it was always like, aha, this is a bit dangerous. But that fascination, that wow-experience, always outweighed it.

Then I had a few situations that were a bit touch-and-go. I even had an accident once. And since then, I've been dealing with risk a lot more when paragliding. So now I really look at, okay, what's the weather like? What's my mental state? Am I even in the right headspace to take off right now? And I try to... I don't think you can ever eliminate risk, but you can at least limit it and keep it manageable. And for me, it's exactly the same with space flight. Of course, there's a risk. But it's relatively well-quantified by now, at least. So for me, at least, it's a risk I would take now because it's simply worth it for me.

Which do you consider riskier? Paragliding or flying into space in a rocket?

Oh, that's difficult. So, for spaceflight, the requirements for the new providers are that a maximum of one out of 200 missions can result in a loss of crew. So, you should... that's a relatively high risk. It's 1 in 200 at the end that something goes wrong.

Loss of Crew really means I lose the whole mission, so the people are dead.

Exactly, that would be the ultimate disaster. Exactly, so that's roughly what's being aimed for between 2 and 500, depending on how exactly you calculate it and so on. So, I think it's a relatively high risk. If you compare that to paragliding, it's probably higher, depending on how you fly. But yeah, I also know many paragliders who haven't even done 200 flights yet and they've already had accidents. That's why it's very, very hard to compare. So, I believe that with paragliding, you have much more under your own control. I can decide for myself whether I take off, where I fly, whether I have to fly into this valley, deep or not. And with the rocket, it's like, of course, you decide to do it.

I've already done that. But in the end, it's still somewhat determined by outside factors. If there's a technical defect, then I can obviously do as much damage control as possible. But ultimately, it's a bit like being remote-controlled, like when you're sitting in an airplane. You don't have direct control over what happens to you in the worst-case scenario.

If you imagine what you'll probably have to do sometimes today, do you get scared?

Yes. But I'm also afraid of paragliding.

I don't think fear is necessarily something negative. I mean, paralyzing fear—when you say you're so scared that you won't do it even if you want to—that's something negative to me. But if I say, sure, I'm afraid because there's obviously a risk involved, because it's something I'm not familiar with. You're always afraid of the unknown. But I choose to use that fear, which might also be a guide for where I need to be careful. In that case, it's quite positive for me. That's why I'd say, yeah, I'm afraid, but not so much that I wouldn't do it.

Well, fear is also very much a state of mind. Does astronaut training include something like mental training, for example, to learn how to deal with fears?

Yes, well, we haven't done that yet. But what definitely is part of it before the launch is survival training, where you're really pushed to your physical and psychological limits. And of course, there's the mental training, the mental component. How do you react when you're really exhausted and it's a dangerous situation, and you have to make a quick decision? All of that is trained. I think paragliding is actually a good basis for that, because you often have those situations where you're suddenly confronted with some unexpected scenarios. Suddenly everything starts rising and you think, oh my god, why is everything rising now? And then you have to make quick decisions and stay cool. That's why I hope I've taken something away from paragliding that will be useful to me.

That would be from a practical standpoint. Have you ever done something like mental training as part of paragliding?

Yes, I actually did. I did it with—what was her name again? Yvonne Date, I did a mental training session with Yvonne Date for one day. For me, it was also relatively quick after my accident, because I was really—I was really afraid of paragliding. And it wasn't that meaningful fear that tells me now, okay, it's nice, maybe you should rather walk down and not take off, but it was really that paralyzing fear where, for no reason at all, I basically said, oh God, oh God, I just have to get down, and then I went to land and actually ruined a perfectly good flight day for myself. And then I did this mental training. We worked a lot with images, like imagining a bird and how you feel then. And that did help me. I mean, I still nibbled away at that fear of paragliding for a relatively long time.

I'd say that nowadays, the fear is still there, but it doesn't paralyze me anymore. I can look past it and do it anyway.

What kind of accident was that? What happened to you?

Yeah, that was good. Probably there's always some pilot error involved somewhere. But it wasn't a classic situation. It was in Chile. I'm in Chile a lot, I fly there all the time. And it was already relatively late in the evening, so when it was actually already quiet. It was somehow half an hour before sunset. And in Chile, you fly relatively close to the slope. Simply because that's where the thermals are. And I was close to the slope. And then, really out of nowhere for me, there was massive turbulence. At the time, I was also flying a slightly smaller, slightly more dynamic glider. And I just realized, okay, I just don't have the glider under control this fast. And the glider collapsed massively, towards the slope side, of course. And I just slammed head-on into the slope. And I was really lucky that in the spot where I hit, there was only sand.

Because there were also stones and rocks nearby. So I could have easily thought, I could have hurt myself much worse. In the end, I didn't even have anything really critical. I mean, I was bruised all over from head to toe. Huge hematomas. But that was it. So I was incredibly lucky. But mentally, it took me a long time. I'd say almost one or two years just to get over it. Because for me, it just came out of nowhere. And I realized, okay, the risk is always there. Even if you... I usually say of myself that I'm a rather sensible pilot who doesn't take unnecessary risks. But that was just something. I'd say that wasn't a wrong decision. Maybe the glider was a bit too hot for me. Although I actually thought I had it under control. I just realized that this residual risk is always there.

You have to accept that. You can never eliminate it.

If you say it came out of nowhere, that's also a kind of being at the mercy of fate. If you're sitting as an astronaut on a rocket now, on top of in your capsule that's blasting you up there,

then you can really say, okay, I'm putting my life in God's hands. Or rather, in the hands of the technicians who hopefully did it right.

Into the hands of the engineers. I mean, the great thing is, of course, that hundreds, thousands of people are working on these systems. And also on different emergency procedures. You saw that quite clearly with that failed Soyuz launch. This Soyuz launch failed last autumn. And the two astronauts weren't able to get to the ISS. But they did at least make it back to Earth safely. And there you see, okay, there are very, very many smart people who think about all sorts of scenarios. And in that case, it worked out very well. I mean, nothing happened to them. Well, that messed everything up a bit with the experiments on the ISS. But it wasn't a drama. So that's why I think I would just trust the engineers. The people who built the rockets.

And say, well, they must have done a good job. I don't think there's anything else you can do at that point, when you're sitting there in the rocket.

Let's jump around the topic a bit. You just said you're actually just getting back from Chile. You were at that ALMA telescope again, worked there. Then you also mentioned, okay, your accident happened in Chile itself. So you've already paraglided in Chile. Do you always take your paraglider with you now whenever you have to be in Chile for work?

Yeah, unfortunately not always. It's just not always possible. I did it a lot for a while. I lived in Chile for six months at one point. I was in Iquique every month then. On my last trip, it unfortunately didn't work out, simply because I didn't have the time. And dragging the paraglider along for two days is, of course, always a bit of an effort. But I've been to Iquique, I don't know, probably 15 times or so. For a longer period. And I learned a very, very lot there. I also started paragliding there. So my very first attempts with the paraglider were actually in Chile. I didn't speak much Spanish back then. It was a bit difficult. Then my instructor once wrote, izquierda, izquierda, no, no, no, la otra izquierda. It was, yeah, it was funny.

And that's what prompted me to get a license here in Germany as well. But Iquique, Chile is a super great paragliding area. You can basically fly every day there. Out of all the days I've been there—and that was several months if you add it all up—I think there was only one day we didn't fly. We couldn't fly. And that's where you also learn how to deal with strong winds. So much maneuvering. That's actually what I enjoy the most. This playing with the wind there in the desert. It's absolutely amazing.

Just to clarify: Izquierda means left, and la otra izquierda is the other left. For the people who might not have understood the Spanish just now. So in Chile, they have the same training issues as they might sometimes have in German flight schools.

Yes, probably. But in German—well, in German flight schools, there are probably also people who don't speak German. Yes, that was the main problem.

What does paragliding still mean to you today, when you have such big goals as flying into space?

So for me, paragliding is something that I don't think will ever be replaced by other types of flying. I mean, last summer, unfortunately, I did very little paragliding, simply because I put all my free weekends where the weather was somehow good into getting my pilot's license.

But paragliding still has this component—it's silent. And you're truly in harmony with yourself and nature. And you don't have an engine lifting you up; you just wait for the thermals, for nature to do it for you. And for me, that's what puts paragliding on a completely different level than flying in machine-driven aircraft or even flying into space. It's simply a natural experience where you find yourself.

You just said that you didn't fly much last summer. I assume this double burden—you have your job as an astronomer, and then you basically have the other job as an astronaut trainee. Doesn't that take up so much time that you're saying you can pretty much forget about paragliding until you've flown into space?

Yes, I've scaled back. I think I have to admit quite clearly that I'm flying very little now. I had maybe 15 flights last year. That's very, very little for me. And I just said, okay, I don't have to go out in the heavy thermal conditions now, I've really just been doing pleasure flights. I did that quite deliberately because I thought, okay, this way I'm on the safe side, I just want to enjoy it. But not flying at all, I thought that at the beginning of the year too. I thought I was on the go so much, but then my friends called and asked, don't you want to go paragliding? Then I was in the mountains, I saw the paragliders, and I realized, no, I don't necessarily want to live without paragliding either. And sure, I've scaled back a bit. I've also lowered my expectations here. I was also with a

half-hour little thermals flight, totally satisfied because I told myself, okay, I don't really have the energy to go on a cross-country flight or take any risks right now, I don't want to. But still, just this experience of nature and enjoying it, I don't want to have to do that anymore. You

You just brought up risk. Sure, paragliding always involves risk, and if you were to go out now and step into a rabbit hole, your astronaut dreams might be over. But that's no reason to say I have to minimize risk completely, because I mean, you can step off the next flight of stairs or something like that. How do you think about that?

It's like this for us: we don't have a fixed mission yet, and the mission is still about two years away. So, there are already requirements for astronauts who actually have a mission with a fixed date, where they say, for example, the last six to nine months, that you should rather avoid such activities. So, I certainly won't go paragliding two days before the planned spaceflight, because that would simply be too much of a risk. I mean, something small can always happen—you step into a hole somehow, you tear a ligament or something like that. I know so many people who've had that happen. So I would definitely stop doing that then. Right now, it's more like I say, okay, I always try to minimize the risk for myself anyway. I do like to live my life, after all.

Sure, something small can always happen, but okay, if I were to sprain my foot now, it would have little influence on whether I fly into space in two years or not. I could still continue with my training regardless. So, I'm not in the phase yet where I have to minimize every risk.

Do you think you can take anything away or learn anything for your paragliding from being an astronaut?

Phew. That's an interesting question. No one has asked me that before.

I don't know. I think maybe it's this mental strength. I mean, I think if you were actually sitting in a rocket and were in space,

then probably a strong thermal shaking you around a bit wouldn't be that bad or that exciting anymore. So I think maybe it's this composure and this calmness, telling myself, okay, good, hey, it's all known. At least there's air. If there's a hole somewhere here, I won't suffocate immediately. Maybe that.

If you were to actually become Germany's first astronaut, you would gain a certain level of fame in Germany, one could assume. You could even say that you'd probably become Germany's most famous paragliding [personality]. Yeah, the woman who also does paragliding. Are you already thinking about those kinds of roles you might have to take on one day, or are you just letting it all come to you naturally?

I'm more of a "let it happen" type of person. I mean, it's already the case that I'm out in the media a lot.

So I hope that I can use my role to give my passions a bit more

to give it some glamour, or whatever glamour means. But for me to also say that paragliding is cool. Go paragliding. And to do that a bit

to bring it into the general consciousness. I do the same with yoga. I also do yoga. With the natural sciences, with astrophysics, with my pulsating blue subdwarf stars—that's my field of research—I do it the same way, just thinking that maybe I can also infect other people with my enthusiasm.

Then go ahead and infect me with your passion for pulsating blue subdwarf stars. What's so special about that term?

Right, so they're small, as the name suggests. Subdwarfs are smaller than dwarfs. The Sun, for example, is a dwarf star. That means a subdwarf star is even smaller than the Sun. It's only about one-tenth the size of the Sun. Blue is simply the color. And in astronomy, it's the opposite of, say, a water tap. There, blue is hot. So blue is hot and red is cold. You have to rethink that a bit.

Blue is small, hot, and pulsating. That means they show variations in brightness. It's a bit like a lamp on a dimmer, turning on and then off again. And you can observe these oscillations—this dimming and brightening. What we can do with that is look into the interior of the stars. So, you look at these oscillations and, with the help of models, you can peer into the stars to see how they are structured on the inside.

You don't sound very enthusiastic. I'm just trying to understand. But do you also look at these blue subdwarfs with your ALMA telescope, or do you use other data for that?

Unfortunately, you can't observe these dwarfs very well with ALMA because ALMA observes the cold universe and the stars are hot. That means it doesn't work that well. So, I actually observe my stars more with optical telescopes, like the VLT, which is also operated by the ESO in Chile, or with other optical telescopes.

When you imagine something like looking at stars that you can't see with the naked eye—they're so small, and something blue is twinkling somewhere—but you need a super hyper-telescope for that, it's always something. You'd say the mind behind that is very technical, someone who imagines something like that. Now, you're a woman, and that's a very technical imagination; many people say, "Well, that doesn't really go together." Others say, "Why not?" Especially in that field, there are always women who are excellent at it. What drove you to think the way you do? And I believe your parents had nothing to do with that at all.

No, my parents are linguists. That means I'm pretty much on my own in my family when it comes to my preference for the natural sciences, or now with space travel and technology. For me, it really didn't come from physics or the technical side.

Through the fascination with space. Simply this fascination with the new. Wow, there's still something out there, something to discover. That was actually what defined it for me. The technical side, all the physics and mathematics behind it, was rather off-putting for me at the beginning, so during my youth. I thought, oh god, then I have to do physics and math, and I'm not even that great at that. And maybe it won't all work out after all. So that was more my movement. And at some point, I had a teacher who also promoted thermals and who maybe didn't have those outdated role models in his head. He was a very young physics teacher. And suddenly I realized, hey, this is cool, it can be fun. And if it's fun, then you can somehow do it. Well, at least in my case, when I'm motivated and having fun with something, then it fits, then it just flows.

And suddenly I realized, okay, I can do it. I can do physics, why shouldn't I be able to? And then one thing led to another. But even back in my youth, that was something I'd say, oh, yeah, can I do this? And is this for me? And aren't there just nerds sitting in some quiet little room talking to germs? And that's also a bit of what I want to show women and girls with my role here as an astronaut. We don't just sit in a quiet little room working on some codes, letting our beards grow, not washing our hair, and talking to germs. You also have fun with it, you get in contact with other people. And that's something.

And there are about 30 percent women now. So, why not?

So, the percentage of women in astronomy is already higher than the percentage of women in paragliding?

I don't even know what the women's quota in paragliding is. But probably. I don't know. Do you have a statistic for that?

I don't have any statistics, I just have my eyes. And if I only trust my eyes, I'd always say the percentage of those who at least stick with it and keep flying for longer is more like 10, 15 percent or something. But that's just a perceived percentage. I can't say for sure. Is there one thing you can use to explain why, whether it's 15 or 30 percent, it doesn't matter, it's definitely not 50-50? Why are there so many more men than women who go paragliding?

Well, I think risk is definitely a factor. When I tell many women, or friends now, that I go paragliding, they say, "Wow, that would be way too dangerous for me. I'd be way too scared." And that seems to be a bigger issue for women than for men. Probably because of testosterone, or less testosterone. I also know many women who stopped paragliding out of fear. I know many who actually did the basic course, who felt that fascination with flying, but then at some point often had a bad experience or heard about a friend's accident or something, and then just quit. So I think that's really this risk factor that keeps women away from paragliding.

What is different in your thinking then?

I don't know. I mean, like I said, I don't see fear as something negative. I'm also happy to admit it, and all my friends who fly with me always say, "Wow, but you fly so well, why do you always worry so much?" So I'm also happy to admit that I'm afraid too, or if a gust of wind comes, I'll also say,

it could go well, but it might not go well, and that's why I'm just not starting right now. So I think it's simply about how you deal with this fear.

So, okay, I'm afraid of it, so I don't do it. After the accident, I was also briefly at the point where I said, what's the point of it anymore? It's really worth the risk. That's one possibility. The other possibility is to say, okay, it gives me so much, just in terms of the experience, of what it gives me for my life, that it's simply worth the risk, and then you have to somehow overcome this fear or at least live with it in parallel and keep going anyway.

I enjoy paragliding, and I minimize the risks, but it's worth taking that risk anyway. And if other people decide for themselves that it's just not worth it anymore, I can certainly understand that, and I think that for women, this willingness to take risks is generally lower than for men.

Well, you said earlier that paragliding is so important to you that you assume you'll just keep doing it.

But it could be that over the next year or two, you won't get around to much of it because you're so tied up with this astronaut training—you'd say, I'll just do a few gliders or something for fun and for that nice feeling in between. But once you've been in space, hopefully, do you still have any plans where you say, I definitely want to achieve that again with the paraglider?

Oh, I had so many plans.

Well, with work and everything, it's always getting harder. I think to actually carry out these plans—I've always wanted to do an Alpine crossing, like from Ljubljana to France, maybe Nice or something—and then really have to fly non-stop for months, but just be able to take it relaxed and have that experience in nature,

my big dream. But well, I think that wouldn't have happened now, even without the astronaut thing, just because of the job. I mean, I think if you're starting in really uninhabited areas, in more difficult terrain, you should have a certain amount of practice with paragliding, and if you're only doing 15, 20, 30 flights a year, then that's just not there. So I think you really need the time and the headspace to do that.

So just really heading off with the paraglider, with one or two buddies, and then over the Alps.

Now, back to astronaut training, or rather, the upcoming period. You mentioned that there are two of you. So there are two candidates who could do it. When will it be decided who it will be in the end?

So, who flies into space? Well, at the moment, nothing is set in stone. Because we are a private project, we are very flexible. First of all, the mission isn't even planned yet, and the funding isn't secured yet. That would have to be in place first, and then, sometime a few months before the mission, it will be decided which one of us actually is it. That will certainly depend on the training results and the experiments we do. But it's not clear at all yet how or when that will be decided.

What do you mean by the experiments you do? Do you also have to make proposals for which experiments you want to conduct yourself? And then they say, "that's a good one, that's a bad one"?

So I assume that these experiments are basically ordered by the investors. That's also the case with Alexander Gerst; he doesn't come up with what he's doing on his own, but there are people all over the world, research teams, who propose various experiments. Those are then evaluated by a committee.

And I think it won't be any different for us, with perhaps the difference that we also have the commercial component. So that means if a company, a large high-tech company for example, were to say, "Hey, we'll give you 5 million euros, for example, and in return, please do this," then we'll do it. So we'll do their experiment. The astronauts are, so to speak, more like the service staff who carry out the experiments for the scientists on Earth. And of course, you have to understand the experiments to some extent, but the astronauts are usually not the ones who actually get the data and then evaluate it. Those are specialized teams down on Earth.

If the decision were made that your competitor, friend, or whatever she is to you, that she would be the one to go, what would that mean for you? Butch, you wouldn't be an astronaut anymore and would be out of this program, or how would things proceed?

Yeah, okay, it's always hard to imagine. Of course, it would be a huge shame and disappointing for me, that's clear, we both obviously want to fly. On the other hand, I'd think that at least the project would have been a success. That's what both Insa and I say. We support each other, we have a very good relationship, we support one another, we're both working for the project and primarily, it's about making the project a success, about actually sending the first German woman into space. Of course, each of us wants to be that woman, that's very clear. But it would be much worse for me right now if the project failed, for example due to funding, than if Insa flies.

Can Insa actually do paragliding too?

I don't think so.

So she's not one of the three, where you say there were six women left and three of them alone could even do paragliding?

No, those weren't the six finalists, that was in a preliminary round. We were split into smaller groups, and none of those other five women made the final selection either. Exactly. That wasn't Insa; she was in a completely different group than I was.

Is there some kind of saying for astronauts when they take off? Like, for skiing, we say "break a leg" or something like that. When flying, there are often spectators standing there, and you wonder, what do you say then? Break a leg? And you think, God knows not, but "have a good flight" or something. What do you say to an astronaut when she takes off?

Well, I'd actually say the same thing as with paragliding. And we always say "Happy Landings." Because in the end, the most important thing is having a good flight, but then also landing safely and happily.

How does the landing work when you come back from the ISS? At least with the Russians, we know they land in the steppe with their capsule, somewhere in Kazakhstan, I think. How is it planned with SpaceX or Boeing? Do you splash down somewhere in the ocean or what have they planned?

So it would be similar in that you're hanging from a parachute coming down, but as far as I know, both SpaceX and Boeing have a water landing planned. It would be the same principle: you're in a capsule, it comes down on a parachute, it just doesn't land in the steppe in Kazakhstan, but somewhere in the Atlantic probably, or wherever the conditions are good. And then you're rescued by, hopefully, a ship's crew.

Is that a classic parachute? Because I saw a picture the other day of some SpaceX test thing, and it was actually like a paraglider with a capsule coming down, and it was supposed to land in some kind of net and be caught. That would be a nice connection, too, if you basically fly up with the rocket but land again with the paraglider.

So I think you can control it very, very little, because if the whole thing were hanging from a paraglider, you might even catch thermals at the end and then never come down. So I don't think that would be very practical. It's possible that the newer parachutes are steerable, similar to the Rogallo rescue chutes now or with a paraglider, so that you can definitely see where you're landing. But it won't be a paraglider where you're looking for thermals and then extending your flight a bit.

More like an old-school paraglider, where you'd come down with a glide ratio of 1 to 3. But

I think eventually you want to come down too.

I believe so too. Susanna, thank you for this conversation. For all the adventures ahead, whether they go all the way into space or just over the next mountain, I wish you lots of luck, health, a clear head, little fear—or at least good ways to deal with it—and above all, many good decisions that you can make along the way.

Yes, that's the most important thing.

And as I said, once you've been an astronaut, I'm looking forward to all the advertising you'll be able to do for paragliding as well.

I think what I'm looking forward to most when I get back is,

to have a nice evening flight.

That's great. Okay, thank you and all the best with all the flights you do.

Yeah, thanks. Bye.

That was Susanna Randall in conversation with Lucian Haas. Anyone who wants to learn more about the background of the Astronautinnen initiative can find the associated website online at www.dieastronautin.de. And anyone who especially wants to follow Susanna's further adventures on the way into space should subscribe to the page astrosusanna on Facebook. By the way, Susanna spells her name with a Z, so Susanna. Further episodes of Podz-Glidz can be found on the Looglights blog and on Soundcloud. Podz-Glidz can also be subscribed to via RSS feed or through well-known podcast catalogs like iTunes, Spotify, TuneIn, or Podcast.de. If you enjoy Podz-Glidz and Looglights, please recommend both.

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www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com Now, I'd like to wish you Happy Landings, as Susanna says. Ciao and see you next time.