European Astronaut Corps European Astronaut Corps The European Astronaut Corps is a unit of the European Space Agency (ESA) that selects, trains, and provides astronauts as crew members on U.S. and Russian space missions. As of Nov 2014, 24 ESA astronauts are now able to go board the ISS. There are currently 47 members of the Corps, 26 currently active. The European Astronaut Corps is based at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. They can be assigned to various projects both in Europe (at ESTEC, for instance) or elsewhere in the world, at NASA Johnson Space Center or Star City. According to
Chinese as a foreign language further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his "An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language" (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a "characteristica universalis" modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with missionaries coming to China during the