He had to swallow after the applause in the studio. Repress the tears that welled up in his eyes. Because there he was, at the table at a television program RTL Late Night, alongside fellow astronaut André Kuipers. It was 2018, 33 years after his space flight, and he was finally allowed to address the millions of audiences from his native country from whose attention he had largely escaped until then.
What followed was not an indictment. Not an aggrieved story, no waving of his list of achievements, but a compliment. To the whole country. “There are more astronauts per million people in the Netherlands than in France, Germany or the United States,” he said, ignoring the very question of why no one knew him. As if he wanted to say: ‘we’ managed that just fine.
Accidentally to space
It depicts the man who entered space in 1985, six months before Wubbo Ockels. ‘Lodewijk was very nice and above all very modest’, says Kuipers. ‘He thought his scientific research into crystals was much more important than that one space trip.’
Van den Berg, as a crystal researcher, had more or less accidentally ended up in space. This happened in the then Spacelab, a space laboratory that could be placed in the belly of a Space Shuttle. When they wanted to study how crystals grow in weightlessness, it was easier to train crystal scientists to become astronauts than vice versa.
As a researcher, Van den Berg was commissioned to compile a list of eight candidates. He only got to seven and put himself there, convinced that he would lose weight. After all, he didn’t have the physique of most professional astronauts, who often went into space after a career as a test pilot in the military. In addition, he wore glasses. Yet it was not he who fell, but the rest. And so Van den Berg, to his own surprise, found himself back in the dark of space in 1985.
That scoop was no secret in the Netherlands. ‘Dr. Wubbo Ockels is still the first candidate with Dutch nationality, but his chance seems to be lost to become the first Dutch astronaut’, wrote it General Newspaper in 1984, before launch. ‘Wubbo Ockels dethroned’, did the Democratic-Socialist daily newspaper The Free People a year later, after that launch, it went even further.
Yet the other headlines from that time tell how his native country saw Van den Berg. ‘Old Dutchman’, summed up the Newspaper of the North it together, ‘Zeeland American’, headlined again it AD‘Ex-Dutchman’, thus The Telegraph.
Naturalize
Van den Berg, born on 24 March 1932 in Sluiskil in Zeeland, received an American passport in 1975, ten years before his space flight. As a crystal scientist at the American University of Delaware, he worked on crystals that could be used to measure nuclear radiation. And so that work could only be done by American citizens. He decided to naturalize.
‘Lodewijk has always felt like a Dutchman, and more specifically a Zeelander,’ says Gerard Cuijpers, who was a member of the Delft student association Virgiel together with Van den Berg and who kept in touch with him until shortly before his death. “His family still lives here too.”
It hurts Cuijpers, the honor that Ockels collected as the first Dutch astronaut, while the country forgot its friend. ‘I even sent Wubbo Ockels a letter about that,’ he says. “But I never got an answer.”
Kuipers is also familiar with the difficult relationship between his two former colleagues. ‘Lodewijk trained at the same time as Wubbo, but there was never any real contact. There was no click,” he says. ‘And Lodewijk didn’t have the personality to force himself to the fore.’
In the end, it was probably mainly his American citizenship that ensured that Van den Berg largely remained under the Dutch radar. In 2005 he acknowledged in an interview with the Delft alumni magazine Delft Outlook not sure whether he still had Dutch citizenship at all. ‘I never figured that out exactly; I have yet to do that,” he said at the time. ‘Although: how important is it that you have Dutch papers? Nobody asks about it.’
Zeeland hero
His space work had little to do with the passport, Van den Berg said. ‘We did not represent the Netherlands, we only came from the Netherlands. That is why such a competency game, whose is the first, makes no sense. More important is: what have you contributed scientifically?’
Passport or not, for the people in Zeeland, the man who had taken the provincial flag and that of the municipality of Axel with him during his space flight was a hero anyway. “We wish Wubbo Ockels the very best, but for us Lodewijk van den Berg is and remains the first Dutch cosmonaut,” said a resident of his birthplace Sluiskil in 1985. the Telegraph during a tribute to Van den Berg.
In 2013, a statue of him appeared on that birthplace. And in 2018, a new primary school in Terneuzen, the result of a merger, was given the name Lodewijk College. In this way, that modest first Dutch astronaut in his own homeland also reached a bit of eternity.
3x Louis van den Berg
After his time in space Van den Berg fell asleep during the return to earth. He woke up only three minutes before landing.
Van den Berg went into space as a payload specialist, a feature for scientists and other experts who were allowed to take a shortened astronaut training course. Since the stays on the International Space Station have become longer, the payload specialist no longer exists.
As a US citizen Van den Berg flew his mission on behalf of NASAwhile Ockels and Kuipers went up on behalf of the European space agency ESA.