Die Astronautin is a private German human spaceflight program with the goal of sending the first German woman into space by 2023 via a short-duration flight to the International Space Station.
[2] When the project was first established, the team planned for the first flight of a female German astronaut to occur by 2020, although this goal has been pushed back once to mid-2021, and again to 2023.
In October 2018 the project signed a memorandum of understanding with Axiom Space regarding astronaut training and flight opportunities.
The program put out a call for astronauts in March 2016 and received over 400 applications from German women aged between 27 and 37, coming from STEM, military and other aviation backgrounds.
[6][7] The next month the project announced their final two candidates, one of whom would fly the mission with the other acting as her backup.