Sergei Yakimov used to live in the Ukrainian city of Zhitomir before his life changed entirely. Now he is one of the selected candidates to fly to Mars and stay there forever. However, at the current time the mission is delayed, so he may never be able to fly to the red planet. In the meantime, the Ukrainian guy moved to the US to pursue his dream.

Flying to Mars? Maybe not

Sergei Yakimov was born in Germany, then lived in Belarus for some time and moved to Ukraine, Segodnya reported. At school he was already fond of cosmonautics and aircraft modelling. An engineer by profession, Sergey started working at the Space Research Institute. At first he was working on documentation for satellite projects, then took his skills to operations of processing information from satellites.

The international project “Mars-One” plans to establish a human colony on the Red Planet in the near future. Out of 200 thousand people from all over the world who expressed a desire to fly to Mars, only 100 hundred were selected. Sergei was one them.

While the expedition of “Mars-1” is postponed due to financial reasons, he intends to become a NASA astronaut. A year ago he moved to the United States. In 4 years he intends to become a citizen and take part in NASA astronaut selection. NASA works in projects of trips to the orbit, Moon, Mars, therefore it is now hard to say where the space ships will be flying in 10-20 years.

“I have time to improve myself, my skills physically and mentally in order to find an opportunity to participate in other projects. Personally I believe that relying on one project in which nothing depends on you makes no sense. One should look for other possibilities just in case,” Sergei stated.

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