“So, um, here at Orion, just got back to it.”
April 24, 2026, @astro_christina

“Four people are sitting up there in the capsule atop this rocket on their way to the Moon, farther than humans have ever flown before.” At 00:50 minutes, one hears the voice of Bild reporter Thomas Kausch. It is a YouTube video of the launch of the Orion rocket as part of the Artemis II mission on April 1, 2026, 22:35 UTC. During the 49 seconds before that, one hears the countdown, spoken by a tinny-sounding voice, and sees the rocket lift off. In long shot, in medium-long shot, in close-up. The video stutters intermittently. In fish-eye perspective, the rocket launches, interrupted by black sequences. The image turns white, and one can imagine the forces required to propel the rocket out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Everyone knows these images; we have seen them countless times. Both as footage of real rocket launches and as Hollywood stagings. My mother told me that in 1968 her mother got her out of bed in the middle of the night so she could watch the launch of the Apollo 8 mission live on television. Since then there have been nine further Moon missions. Looking through the list of astronauts, at first only male names. Apollo 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 10, Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 13, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16, Apollo 17. The first female name is Christina Hammock Koch. Born in 1979, she is the first woman permitted to take part in a Moon mission. On Wikipedia one finds a “space selfie” of her during a spacewalk outside the ISS in 2019. The image shows her face behind the visor of her astronaut helmet, in the background the blackness of space and a section of Earth. Sunlight falls on Christina Koch’s face; she is smiling. Inside a spacesuit, because of the life-support system, temperatures of 20–25 degrees Celsius are always maintained.

Nicole Köhler, born in 1969, becomes Hamburg’s youngest master hairdresser and opens her first own salon in 1997. She now runs her seventh salon. She tells me what it feels like to sit under a hood dryer. “At first it’s cool — it takes a little while until it gets warm — but then it gets very warm. While you’re sitting under the hood, you can’t really talk because it’s very loud; most people read during that time. So you talk before and after the hood dryer.”

Nicole tells me that one is usually under the hood dryer for about 30–45 minutes; including the work before and after, customers spend around one and a half hours with her. Older customers in particular often feel this is too short.

“In the past, women came — back then salons were still divided into women’s and men’s salons — once a week. People exchanged news and friendships developed.” She says she always understood her salons as places of social exchange, as an extended living room in which she could experiment

with herself, just as her customers could. At the same time, she says she often experienced the stories and worries of her customers as burdensome; nowadays she is good at setting boundaries and tells her customers when it becomes too much for her.

I ask Nicole how often she still uses hood dryers today. “Rather rarely,” she answers. Fashion has changed over the last forty years. She always says over the last twenty years, but that isn’t true at all. She laughs. She adds that she dislikes the new hood dryers; although you can adjust temperature and airflow, they all look sterile. In her salon there are still old ones in red, orange, and panty beige standing around as decoration.

I would have liked to ask Christina Koch what it feels like to be inside a spacesuit. How does one perceive the outside world? What can one see? What can one hear? Are the suits tailored to the individual astronauts, or is there one standard size? What does it feel like when your life depends on a suit? But I did not dare send her a message on Instagram.

“All right, um, I am about to set up my sleeping bag. So I thought I would show you how it works. Um, when we first got here, we were trying to figure out where we would all sleep, and we kind of decided maybe if I was upside down in the middle that I would take up less space. So, we decided I would kind of hang like a bat, like this. So, I tied my sleeping bag up here. And, as you see, it went flying. And then, down. So yeah, that’s basically it, and it’s just very comfortable.”

April 30, 2026, @astro_christina

— Niclas Schöler, May 2026