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First European Commander of the ISS
RobGoldsmith writes 'ESA astronaut Frank De Winne became the first European commander of the International Space Station this morning with the departure of Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka who had filled this role since April. De Winne is the first non-American and non-Russian to take on this role. Watch the videos and view images here.'
Historically, it's a province of Mongolia.
More to the point, it's not part of the European Union, and as such has it's own space program. As such De Winn is the first form the European Space Agency, which imo makes calling him the first European within reason. Keep in mind that geographically the Asia/Europe division is pretty much arbitrary anyway.
What does being commander entail?
In an emergency I suppose someone would be responsible for barking orders.
But realistically everyone up there, (now that the Cirque du Soleil clown is gone) are professionals and scientific types, and virtually all work schedules are managed by ground support teams.
Commanders in such a working environment generally are cajolers rather than of commanders anyway, but with the working environment I can't see them having much real need of a commander on a day to day basis, other than to lobby ground controllers for workload changes, or more snacks in the next cargo ship.
I suppose if they are still bickering over who gets to use which toilet they might have selected the Euro guy to take the edge off the situation.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Offensive? I'd think a lot of Russians would be insulted if you said they were European. There's a long and mixed tradition of Russia wanting to be a part of Europe and wanting to be something else. On one hand, you have Peter the Great, and subsequent czars, who thought Europe was the cats meow. Then, on the other hand, there's plenty of people that worked for the czar, that thought speaking french in court was a bunch of crap and that europeans sucked anyway. As it is, I think the Russians would prefer to not be thought of us Europeans, but as their equal to them. Russians are just Russians.
This is my sig.
Frank De Winne of the EU is the first "European" commander (and all the Russian commanders don't count) in the same sense that people from the United States are "Americans" while people from Canada, Panama, Chile, etc. are not. It's not geographically accurate, but it's culturally/politically meaningful.
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As an IT Trainer for the E.C. you are actually very right! I recently gave a course in HTML5 in English, but also translated ad hoc into French the non technical matter (all terminology is a bit in English). Afterwards i got some angry comments from French-speaking trainees (France, Belgium, but not the Luxemburg-guy) that i did not translate HTML-terminology ranging from "tables" to "Document Object Model" into French. The friggin' thing is in friggin' English for f's sake! (I am a native dutch-speaking Belgian fluent in German, English and French. So don't give me that xenolinguafobic response...)