It was not what Matthias Maurer was expecting when he signed up for sea survival training with Chinese astronauts.

“It was so nice and relaxed,” says the German European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut. “I was floating there in the life raft, looking up at the sky – I only needed some music and it would have given me a real Hawaii holiday feeling.”

The exercise took place last year at a newly built training centre near the coastal city of Yantai, around an hour’s flight south-east of Beijing. For two weeks, Maurer and fellow Esa astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti, lived and worked alongside their Chinese counterparts.

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“We trained together, stayed in the same building as the Chinese astronauts, shared the same food and it was quite an intense experience,” says Maurer. “It felt like being part of a family – it was completely different to being in Houston, where I rent an apartment and see my colleagues only during a two or three-hour training session.”

Whereas other space agencies run special team-building exercises to help astronauts work together, the Chinese have adopted a more fundamental approach.

“The Chinese astronauts even spend their vacations together, they know each other perfectly well so they’re like brothers and sisters,” says Maurer. “When we lived there we felt so warm-heartedly accepted into their family.”