赴中国太空舱训练，欧洲宇航员苦练中文

It was not what Matthias Maurer was expecting when he signed up for sea survival training with Chinese astronauts.

当莫伊雷尔（Matthias Maurer）报名参加海上生存训练时，他可没想到会是现在的状态。这个训练是与中国宇航员一起进行的。

“It was so nice and relaxed,” says the German European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut. “I was floating there in the life raft, looking up at the sky – I only needed some music and it would have given me a real Hawaii holiday feeling.”

“这里的生活真是太美好惬意了”，这名欧洲航天局 （European Space Agency ） 的德国宇航员说道，“我在救生筏上漂浮着，仰望苍穹，这时只要再来一点音乐，就足以让我有在夏威夷度假的感觉了。”

The exercise took place last year at a newly built training centre near the coastal city of Yantai, around an hour’s flight south-east of Beijing. For two weeks, Maurer and fellow Esa astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti, lived and worked alongside their Chinese counterparts.

这项演习是去年在烟台附近的一个新建的培训中心里进行的。烟台是北京东南方向的一个沿海城市，乘飞机仅需一个小时。两周时间里，莫伊雷尔和同样来自欧洲航天局的宇航员克里斯托佛雷提（Samantha Cristoforetti）与他们的中国同行一起生活、工作。

“We trained together, stayed in the same building as the Chinese astronauts, shared the same food and it was quite an intense experience,” says Maurer. “It felt like being part of a family – it was completely different to being in Houston, where I rent an apartment and see my colleagues only during a two or three-hour training session.”

“我们和中国宇航员呆在同一栋大楼里，一起训练，吃着同样的伙食，那真是一次印象深刻的经历。”莫伊雷尔说：“我感觉自己就像是大家庭的一部分，这与我之前生活和训练完全不同。那时我在休斯顿，住在租来的公寓里，只有在两三个小时的航天训练中才会看到我的同事们。”

Whereas other space agencies run special team-building exercises to help astronauts work together, the Chinese have adopted a more fundamental approach.

其它太空机构都是用专门的团队建设活动来促进宇航员间的合作，而中国人的方法更为直接。

“The Chinese astronauts even spend their vacations together, they know each other perfectly well so they’re like brothers and sisters,” says Maurer. “When we lived there we felt so warm-heartedly accepted into their family.”

“中国宇航员甚至连节假日都呆在一起，他们彼此非常了解，就像兄弟姐妹一样”，莫伊雷尔说，“当我们在中国时，能感受到他们十分热心地接纳我们加入他们的大家庭。”

China’s Shenzhou spacecraft, which first carried an astronaut (or Taikonaut as they’re known) into orbit in 2003, is designed for a crew of three. It’s based on Russian Soyuz spacecraft technology and looks disconcertingly similar. But Soyuz has been flying astronauts for 50 years and is designed around a rocket that first saw service at the very the dawn of the space age. The Shenzhou is much more 21st Century.

中国宇航员在2003年乘坐神舟号飞船首次进入太空，神舟号可容纳三名宇航员，这是基于俄罗斯联盟号宇宙飞船设计的，两者外形看起来也相差无几。但联盟号已经载人飞行了50年，其设计受在太空时代早期最先服役的运载火箭的局限。相比之下，神舟号是更加先进的21世纪产品。

“I was surprised by the dimensions,” says Maurer. “It has a larger diameter than the Soyuz capsule and is much higher – they’ve had a good look at the Russian hardware, they’ve learned what are the good parts and looked at what they can improve.”

“我对中国宇宙飞船的空间大小颇感惊讶。”莫伊雷尔说，“它的直径比联盟号的太空舱大得多。中国设计师对俄罗斯的硬件进行了仔细的研究，已经掌握了哪些是好的部分、哪些是可以改进的部分。”

If the space capsule splashes-down at sea for instance, the design of the Shenzhou makes the whole experience of swapping space suits for survival suits before clambering out of a bobbing space capsule much easier.

例如，如果太空舱溅落（特指人造卫星、宇宙飞船等返回地球时，按预定计划内落入海洋）在海上，神舟号的设计使得更换太空服，再从漂浮的太空舱里爬出来这个过程变得更加容易。

“There is so much room, we even had inflatable rubber boats, which we don’t have in the Soyuz,” he says. “With the Russian sea survival training you jump into the water, there’s no boat – it gets very chilly and it’s much, much harder.”

“太空舱里有这么大的空间，甚至还配有充气橡皮船，这在联盟号上是没有的”，他说，“在俄罗斯的海洋生存训练中，你要跳入水中，因为没有船，周遭异常寒冷，那条件要困难的多得多。”

Maurer only recently qualified as an astronaut but, in his previous role at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, began developing ties with the once secretive Chinese human space programme in 2012. He visited their Beijing training centre a year later to look at their facilities and simulators. And, in 2016, a Chinese astronaut took part in one of Esa’s regular caving expeditions.

莫伊雷尔最近才获得宇航员资格，但他曾经在德国科隆的欧洲宇航员中心（European Astronaut Centre）工作，因此早在2012年就开始与曾经高度机密的中国人类太空计划建立了联系。一年后，他参观了北京培训中心，看到了那里的设施和模拟器。在 2016年，一名中国宇航员也参加了欧洲航天局定期举办的洞穴探险活动。

Along with Cristoforetti and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, Maurer has also been learning Mandarin. “It’s good but it needs improvement,” he confesses. Although, he tells me, his name in Chinese translates as “Horse of Heaven”.

与克里斯托佛雷替和法国宇航员佩斯奎（Thomas Pesquet）一道，莫伊雷尔也一直在学普通话。他说，“我的普通话还好，但需要提高。”莫伊雷尔还告诉我，他的名字在中国翻译成“天堂之马”。

Maurer hopes to be make his first spaceflight to the ISS in 2020. After that he will be well-positioned to become one of the first foreign astronauts to fly alongside Taikonauts to the Chinese station in around 2023.

莫伊雷尔希望能在2020年在国际空间站上进行他的首次太空飞行。此后，他将成为首批在2023年左右与中国宇航员一起飞往中国空间站的外国宇航员之一。