Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut by Samantha Cristoforetti

Author:Samantha Cristoforetti [Cristoforetti, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241371398
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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After that emotional highpoint in Baikonur, it wasn’t easy to go back to the routine of training. To be frank, it was truly frustrating. Inevitable, and expected, but frustrating. Four days after taking part in the launch, our eyes still shining with images, hugs and smiles, sparks of light in the night, dawn’s flames reflected on Syr Darya … Only four days later I was in Cologne, at EAC for a week of refresher training on ATV. While my thoughts were in Kazakhstan, languishing in a fabulous dream from which I refused to wake up, and my heart jumped ahead, anticipating the cold and snow of Baikonur in November, a limp puppet sat in the simulator, mechanically executing operations that I knew inside out by now and for which I felt I needed no further training. It took me a while to come to terms with the frustration I felt about the next six months of ordinary life before my departure for space. Ordinary life. I don’t know how many people would agree with that definition. Was I too used to a life of excitement, an extreme case of hedonistic adaptation? To be fair, Reid and Alex had warned us: they, too, had found the return from Baikonur disheartening.

Luckily, I was granted ten days’ holiday. I’d known for a while that it would be my last chance to see family and friends who were normally far away, and for that reason I’d sent an invitation months before: Futura Party, 7 June, from 12.30 onwards. My parents organized a big party, blessed by a lovely early summer sun, which heightened the pleasure of seeing so many friends from childhood, adolescence and adult life. I was bound to most of these people not by virtue of seeing them regularly, but by an elective affinity that had survived infrequent contact and the fragmentation of my life, punctuated as it was with separations and new beginnings, a life in which I carried my house around with me like a snail. A slimy, silvery trail remained, and, looking back at it from this point in time, the whole of it traced and meandering behind me, it seemed to lead stubbornly and improbably towards a flight in space. That the snail would often take the wrong road, that providential rain arrived sometimes just in time, that other times a friendly hand had moved the snail a little further, taking it away from a busy road at the right moment – all that was impossible to see from a distance. Those faces and conversations brought back moments from the past, and they all seemed to contain an implicit promise of my inevitable future. I knew very well that this was an illusion, but just for that day I gave in to the irrational, and to the pleasure of feeling the past, present and future meld together in a dense, sparkling bead of quicksilver.

An unexpected flyover put the finishing touch on that beautiful day. Darkness was falling as

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