Porsche Racer and Astronaut Connect In Unlikely Partnership

Unusual Pairing

Porsche has partnered with some interesting entities over the years, including fashion brands and other automakers, but on the surface, its relationship to space exploration may seem a bit odd. However, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and Timo Bernhard - overall Le Mans winner, record holder, and former sports car world champion - have a bit more in common than one might think, as we found out recently.

Photos: Porsche

Look to the Sky

In Saarland, people often look up to the sky, as military jets frequently train over the small German state that shares a border with France. Maurer and Bernhard grew up with this local custom of gazing at the sky, fascinated, always, by technology and speed. One is an astronaut, the other a racing driver. Their careers are both defined by perseverance, exacting personal standards, physical fitness, and working in international teams of roughly the same size. They both know what it's like to rely on the accuracy of technical preparations - both have to withstand high g-forces. In both professions, radio contact with engineers is a lifeline to survival. 

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Extreme Conditions

ESA astronaut Maurer is subjected to extreme acceleration - zero to 28,000 km/h in 10 minutes in the Crew Dragon capsule from SpaceX on the tip of a Falcon 9 rocket. Around him will be hundreds of tons of highly explosive fuel. Roughly 24 hours later, he will begin his duties on the International Space Station (ISS), where Maurer will spend the lion's share of his days working. Each astronaut conducts between 100 and 150 experiments during their roughly six-month stay on the ISS, and in the tightest of spaces. Maurer holds a doctorate in materials science. His favorite activity is creating new metal alloys in weightlessness, for instance, to make motors or solar cells more efficient.

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Side Effects of Space

Maurer, 51, will see his bones age 30 times faster in space than on earth. "We humans are not built for weightlessness," he says. "The musculature and the immune system deteriorate, and I will develop eye problems." The optic nerves can be compromised. To keep fit, two hours of exercise are on the agenda each day. The objective is to find out how people can stay healthy in space - how they can live on the Moon and, from there, travel onwards to Mars. Maurer applied to be an astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2008 and was one of 8,500 candidates. "I was a scientist and I saw the opportunity to work with the best technology as part of an international team - and I was also attracted by the adventure of it." He would have to wait, though. He was only admitted to the European Astronaut Corps in 2017. He has learned how to take his own blood sample and pull teeth, he has mastered survival training in caves and underwater. He learned English, French, and Spanish as a student, now he's added Chinese and Russian for crisis-proof communication with his international colleagues.  

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Early Start

Maurer and Bernhard met in the Porsche pit at the Nürburgring in 2017. They quickly delved deeply into each other's respective métiers. A drawing he did as a child offers irrefutable evidence that Maurer had wanted to be a racing driver. Bernhard, meanwhile, had at the age of four declared to his father and his buddies, recreational racing drivers all, that he also wanted to race cars. "'But not just for fun like you guys,' I said," Bernhard recalled. "I want to be successful and earn money!" added the now 40-year-old. And he never let up. Kart, Formula racing - his parents sensed his ambition and never let on how tight the money really was. Starting in 2012, he was the first driver to grapple his way into the Porsche project to return to the top category of endurance racing. He experienced all the development setbacks with the futuristic Le Mans prototype, the Porsche 919 Hybrid. Being a team player and putting your own ego on the back burner isn’t just prized at the ESA - they're also qualities that characterize Bernhard. 

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Dangerous Drive

In 2014, 2015, and 2016, an overall victory for Porsche at Le Mans seemed within reach for Bernhard. He finally scored the win, with tears in his eyes, in 2017. He was a first-rate athlete throughout his entire career. He also doggedly worked his way into the technology so that he could be even more involved in improving the cars. Racing drivers are also human data recorders for engineers. Open books every inch of the way. In 2018, he drove the 919 Hybrid Evo, a further evolution of the racing car, to a world-renowned lap record on the Nordschleife of the Nürburgring: 5:19:546 minutes. "It was the most dangerous thing I ever did in my career," he admits. 

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Risky Business

"It's important to experience my physical limits in training in order to avoid doing so if worst comes to worst. I'm supposed to function as a researcher, after all," Maurer concluded. "There's just three millimeters of plexiglass between me and certain death. Colleagues have told me about the moment when they opened the hatch and they experienced a fear of falling, which of course in weightlessness is absurd. But if you lose the umbilical cord to the station, you're space junk." "I was no daredevil driver, added Bernhard. "My style was more to go easy on the material and drive strategically. But for the Nordschleife lap with the 919 Evo, I definitely needed all the courage I could muster. No one had done that before. There was simply no script. Reducing the absolute limit of the possible by one percent cut the risk in half."

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