Abstract
This introduction briefly covers the history of European human spaceflight prior to the construction of the International Space Station (ISS).
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Gimbal lock occurs when two of the three axes of a three-axis gyroscope are parallel. When this happens the gyroscope can no longer provide a frame of reference to the spacecraft.
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Merbold would also be the first ESA astronaut to fly with the Soviets on Soyuz TM-20 . Other Western Europeans flew before him but they either represented national space agencies, such as CNES and DLR , or flew as individuals such as Helen Sharman .
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Payload Specialists were not required to be members of a NASA astronaut selection group, because they worked specifically with a payload for a single mission.
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Not to be confused with Soviet cosmonaut, Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov , who flew on Soyuz TM-3 in 1987.
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O’Sullivan, J. (2016). Before ISS. In: In the Footsteps of Columbus. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27562-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27562-8_1
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