It's official, it's off to Thomas Pesquet! The French astronaut should leave in a little over a year in the summer of 2021 for a second mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). He will stay there for six months, he said Wednesday before the deputies.
The date planned by the European Space Agency (ESA), which funds the mission, "is currently around June-July 2021," said Thomas Pesquet during a round table on space organized by the Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Marielle de Sarnez (Modem). It should fly from Cape Canaveral in Florida, and not from Baikonur as the last time, "probably" aboard a SpaceX or Boeing capsule, he said.
Understanding the world from space
This long flight will be the second for the French astronaut who had carried out a first mission on board the ISS from November 2016 to June 2017. "We will work very very hard, it should work well," commented l astronaut at the end of the meeting. Asked about the cost of the ISS, he replied that human exploration was not "necessarily very expensive". "These are important budgets, I grant you, but we must not refrain from preparing for the future," argued Thomas Pesquet.
"The number one goal" of these missions, "is research: we use the properties of the space environment to gain access to things that are hidden on Earth", in the medical field in particular, recalled the astronaut .
A hint of geopolitics
On board the ISS, "we are preparing the continuation of space exploration because this station is not an end in itself, it is a stage on the road to space exploration", he said. . A deputy asked him if the ISS was not "the end of a story", in the light of the current geopolitical context, referring to "the" Careful "side of the station.
"It is true that one has the impression that in the world of the ISS everything is fine, everything is beautiful and that elsewhere it is a little difficult", replied the astronaut, "but the big The advantage of these operations is that they are long-term and that they are perhaps more durable than the cycles of tensions and the easing of international tensions ”.
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