New astronauts selected by European Space Agency
The European Space Agency (ESA) named five new career astronauts yesterday, as well as the world’s first recruit with a disability and 11 other reserve astronauts who will have to wait for their chance to go to space.
Sophie Adenot: The 40-year-old French engineer has flown 3,000 flight hours as a helicopter test pilot.
Her masters at MIT in the United States included work on how to design a centrifuge to help astronauts train for different levels of gravity.
Adenot spent 15 years giving lectures about the importance of science and was awarded the French National Order of Merit in 2022 for being an ambassador for gender equality in science.
Rosemary Coogan: The 31-yearold Briton earned a PhD in astronomy at the University of Sussex in southeast England and has researched extra-terrestrial physics in Germany.
She joined the French space agency CNES earlier this year where she analysed images from the James Webb space telescope, among other projects.
“I’m European but from the UK,” she said at the announcement ceremony. Though Britain left the European Union, it remains in the ESA.
Pablo Alvarez Fernandez: The Spanish aerospace engineer, born in 1988, already has experience with one of the ESA’s main projects — he served as a mechanical architect on the ExoMars rover for aerospace firm Airbus.
He is fluent in Spanish, English, French and Polish, having done his master’s degree at the Warsaw University of Technology.
Raphael Liegeois: The 34-yearold Belgian has studied biomedical engineering and neuroscience in Belgium and France.
The avid hot air balloon pilot also researched brain dynamics in health and disease, the ESA said.
Liegeois taught courses in neuroengineering and statistics at Switzerland’s University of Geneva last year.
In 2017, he spent four months cycling with his wife from Singapore to Belgium, meeting poets along the way.
Marco Sieber: Born in 1989, the Swiss doctor has been working in emergency helicopter rescue as well as being a resident urologist at a hospital in Switzerland.
Before receiving a medical degree at the University of Bern, Sieber was a sergeant in the Swiss army, specialising in paratrooper training.
He dreamt of becoming an astronaut as child, he said in an ESA video.
“This fascination never really faded away,” he said.
John McFall: The ESA selected McFall, a 41-year-old Paralympian, as history’s first ever astronaut recruit with a disability. He will join the agency’s “parastronaut feasibility programme”.
McFall walks with a prosthesis after his right leg was amputated due to a motorcycle accident when he was 19.
He represented Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Paralympics, winning bronze in the T42 200 metres. McFall earned a degree in medicine and surgery in 2014 and has been working as a trauma and orthopaedic specialist in the south of England, the ESA said.
“I was incredibly excited and proud of myself that I got through the selection process,” McFall said. “I’d never thought that being an astronaut was a possibility.”
For the first time, the European Space Agency established a reserve pool of 11 astronauts. They were successful during the selection process, the ESA said, but were not able to be recruited yet. If an opportunity comes up, they will start training — but for the moment will stay in their old jobs.
There are six women and five men in the reserve — two from Italy, two from Germany, and one from Spain, Austria, France, Britain, Poland, Sweden and the Czech Republic.