Turkey’s first astronaut will travel into space to the International Space Station (ISS) on 18 January at 1:11 a.m. local time, Turkish officials announced this week. Alper Gezeravci (Mersin, 1979) will depart on board the Axiom 3 (Ax-3) mission in what Turkey’s Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır called “a great source of inspiration for future generations, as well as an important milestone in Turkey’s space science studies”.
The Axiom 3 mission will travel to space aboard a Dragon capsule on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which will be launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida; the capsule with the group of astronauts is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 1:15 on 19 January.
On his first mission to space, Turkey’s first astronaut will take a specimen of Schrenkiella parvula, a plant endemic to Lake Tuz, Turkey’s second largest lake and one of the world’s largest saline lakes, to the International Space Station. Schrenkiella parvula is an extremophile species capable of surviving in extreme environmental conditions, so experiments will be carried out to test the possibility that it could be used to improve the soil on the Moon or even Mars in future space and colonisation missions.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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