She achieved media prominence in 2018-2020 when she claimed to have secured financial and logistical backing to become a space tourist, on Soyuz MS-20, though she did not gain a seat on the mission.

[1] In 2009, she joined the cargo carrier AeroLogic, and she began flying their Boeing 777-200F aircraft on long-haul services from Leipzig and Frankfurt, to Asia and the United States.

[2] In 2013, she began part-time study at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, for a doctorate in medicine, hoping to apply to the European Space Agency(ESA) as an astronaut[citation needed].

[3] In March 2016, a private campaign called Die Astronautin,[4] was launched with the objective of finding, and flying, a female German astronaut before 2020.

Although she was Austrian, she had lived, worked, and studied in Germany for many years, and hoped to obtain German citizenship before the final two finalists were chosen.

[11] On 8 December 2021 the Soyuz MS-20 mission launched with cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin and two space tourists (both male), the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano.