The next Chris Hadfield?
Italian astronaut’s star takes off
Asimple message goes out to hundreds of thousands of Twitter readers, night after night: “Good night from #space. Buona notte dallo spazio.”
It is always accompanied by a fresh photo of Earth, taken from orbit.
The sender is Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian air force captain and astronaut who is following in the footsteps of Chris Hadfield as she becomes a social media master in orbit.
The videos and stills she shoots show sunsets and northern lights, sea ice off Newfoundland, blue-green Bahamian waters, and quite a lot of Italy.
There are images of Cristoforetti herself in a Star Trek uniform, one of them as she welcomes a cargo ship with coffee for a zero-gravity espresso machine from Lavazza. (Previous Italians in space had to drink instant.)
She has a short exercise video online. She read excerpts from Dante on the poet’s 750th birthday. She teaches a formal physics lesson on gravitational pull on orbiting objects, with equations and floating baseballs. There’s a cooking lesson (she’s the pupil, before launch) where they make her snacks for the trip.
She has posted more than 2,000 photos on flickr.
And Cristoforetti operates the Canadarm2, which is the only way to bring non-Russian cargo ships in to dock with the International Space Station.
“La Donna delle stelle,” an Italian TV network called her: The woman of the stars.
That’s a little breathless, but Italy’s first woman in space has a powerful presence on Earth, and that includes explaining space to a country that has a strong space program. (She could explain the intricacies of her work in any of the at least five languages she speaks.)
The results of her efforts have taken off: She has 470,000 followers in Twitter and also 548,000 on Google+. Hadfield is still a clear leader at 1.33 million and 1.9 million, respectively. But Cristoforetti is parsecs ahead of anyone in space today.
Her fans, mainly posting in Italian, can’t get enough.
“Uno spettacolo straordinario!” one writes on (another) view of Italy. Others: “Stupenda foto!” and “Bellissimo!”
One comment translates as: “With my children, Bianca and Alessandro, we follow you every day. Thank you and a hug from Torino.” And there are many, many more just like it.
At Italy’s embassy to Canada, Francesco Corfaro says the country has embraced this rising star.
She was showing the Italian flag in space on the 150th anniversary of the country’s unification, he said.
The country’s president, Sergio Mattarella, “told everybody that she is a bright example” representing the country. “She’s a brilliant woman,” Corfaro said.
He especially likes her Twitter feed. “In only 140 characters she’s able to represent, to explain in a simple way, the results of very important research.”
Cristoforetti’s Internet wave began a year or so before her launch last November, with an insider’s look at an aspect of astronaut life that is seldom seen: Training. Videos and photos show her spinning in a Russian centrifuge, practising spacewalks underwater (to simulate floating in zerogravity), doing survival training in a snowy Russian forest, and much more.
And her “logbook” on Google+ tells the less glamorous side of space flight, like this entry describing nausea on the two-day flight to the space station:
“Most of the time we would be spinning! In fact, when there are no dynamic operations (i.e.: there’s no need to fire the thrusters or the main engine), the Soyuz is put in gyroscopic stabilization with the solar panels pointed at the sun to maximize power generation.
“It’s actually not the greatest thing for the crew: any space sickness you’re experiencing, the spinning is guaranteed to make it worse (or to give you symptoms, if you didn’t have any). But unless you actively stabilize the attitude with thrusters, the only way to keep a stable orientation is to rotate on an axis.”
At 38, she has a superachiever’s CV that’s typical of astronauts. Fighter pilot, flight engineer, scuba diver, avid reader.
And she sure does speak a lot of languages: Excellent English (she spent a year of high school in the United States, and later a year at an air force base in Texas) and German (her master’s in engineering is from Technische Universität Munich) and French (where she did four months of that master’s) and Russian (where she did 10 months of research at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technologies). She’s adding Chinese as a hobby.
The astronaut is extremely private about her personal life. There’s no mention of family or home life on her official space agency bio, in Italian media, photos, or any of her posts.
But some personal glimpses come through. Here she is in Montreal’s Plateau district in 2012, while training on the Canadarm2:
“I have taken great pleasure in exploring the little quaint streets flanked by trees and row houses, each with a unique facade and with an outdoor staircase leading to an independent entrance on the second floor. Straight or curved, simple or elaborate, rigorously in metal with open steps, these external staircases conjure up a dynamism that matches the colourful livelihood of the neighbourhood.”
In her videos you’ ll hear her say “Don’t panic” a lot. It’s a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; her six-member crew posed in full Hitchhiker costumes for a photo imitating the movie poster.
But it’s also advice that’s close to home. Fellow Italian Luca Parmitano flew on the station in 2013-14, and he had one of the scariest moments in station history. He went on a spacewalk and his helmet started to fill with drinking water from a leak in his suit. He could have drowned.
Cristoforetti keeps the rhythm of daily life going, from an orbit that sees a sunrise and sunset every 92 minutes.
“Good night from #space. Buona notte dallo spazio.”
She is due to land in Russia in mid-May.
In only 140 characters she’s able to explain research