Astronaut Andrew Jay Feustel took a particularly close look from space at the French Open. And was happy in the end for the champions Rafael Nadal and Simona Halep. The American doesn’t want to miss out on his hobby of playing tennis on his mission up high.
NASA pilot Andrew Jay Feustel is kind of a cool guy. A bit abgeSPACEd – and at home on the International Space Station for about two and a half months. But the American also indulges his great passion far away from Mother Earth. At least passively.
After the French Open Feustel, of course a member of the American tennis association USTA, tweeted congratulations to the Paris winners Nadal and Halep. He presented a picture of the facility in Stade Roland Garros that he had shot from about 340 kilometres.
The on-board engineer of the spaceship Soyuz MS-08 also has small rackets and balls in his luggage. No wonder: “Drew” Feustel wants to play tennis in the universe on his third space flight. Through his wife Indira he had come to the game with the felt balls. And the whole family is infected: Feustel’s sons Ari and Aden spent ten years at the Houston tournament as ball children. Houston! Of all things!
“Houston, we have a problem!” Feustel doesn’t want to hear that sentence. Instead, he wants to play the first “tennis match” in history in the exosphere. “It will be a bit like the old video game “Pong”, in which you hit the ball and it then flies straight to the wall – without bouncing open,” Feustel described the “special challenge” in weightlessness.