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EXPEDITION 42/43 CREW INTERVIEW SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI – FLIGHT ENGINEER 5 Q: Why Did You Want to Be an Astronaut?

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EXPEDITION 42/43 CREW INTERVIEW SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI – FLIGHT ENGINEER 5 Q: Why Did You Want to Be an Astronaut? EXPEDITION 42/43 CREW INTERVIEW SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI – FLIGHT ENGINEER 5 Q: Why did you want to be an astronaut? A: I like to say that it was not me who made the choice. It’s not like I chose space, but in a way, I was chosen, because I cannot really find a moment in my life when I made a conscious decision. In a way I always knew that I wanted to travel to space and that goes back to early childhood so it’s maybe just a shortcoming of memory, I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t remember that moment. But for me, and also listening to my parents and other adults, I just always said I want to go to space at some point. Maybe I did not even know that there was such a thing as an astronaut but I knew that I wanted to explore space. I wanted to fly up there. I guess that is probably what distinguishes a passion from an interest. An interest is maybe something you choose but a passion, you are somehow chosen. I would like to find out more about the background that engendered that passion. Tell me about your hometown and your childhood and what your life was like growing up. I grew up in a tiny village in the Alps in Italy. It is like a tourist resort, so my parents had a hotel which was a pretty demanding job. People came in summer for some relaxing time in the mountains and in winter mainly to ski. So summers and winters were bustling with life and then the off seasons, like spring and autumn, were extremely quiet in this mountain village. And my life was quite the same. In summer and winter there were a lot of people coming to the hotel which meant new kids to play with, so I got used to, from an early age, meeting new kids all the time and playing with them for a while and then they will be gone and there would be more kids coming. And then off season again it would be quieter. I was very close to nature, especially in summer with the good weather. I was very fortunate to enjoy a childhood in which you can roam around, as a child, unsupervised. You do not have adults with you all the time. You can go and run around and explore and think that just crossing a bridge is really exciting because you are on your own without adults, or going to explore the river. Maybe I even did things that were dangerous and maybe an adult there would have said, hey, don’t do that, but it is part of, I think, a valuable childhood experience that you just experience things on your own. Maybe that is where I got the taste for adventure that I think is very much part of that desire I always had to go to space. The other thing is that when you grow up in a mountain village there is very little light pollution so the night sky is something that is very present. There are a lot of stars that are visible. I think in my village around midnight they would turn off most of the street lighting, which was not much anyway, so the night sky and the stars have been a very strong presence in my childhood. I always liked to read and I was very much encouraged by my grandmother, who taught me to read at a very young age. I always loved to read science fiction books and, generally speaking, adventure books, so I think that helped, too. I had really good teachers in elementary school. I actually attended elementary school in this village, and then I went elsewhere and I think I had a very good schooling in my initial years. In the fifth grade we had, at least at that time in Italy you started to teach kids about astronomy and planets and the moon and the sun and I had very good teachers who sparked that interest in me. 1 EXPEDITION 42/43 CREW INTERVIEW SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI – FLIGHT ENGINEER 5 Did I understand that at least for part of your high school you left the country? I was in the 11th grade when I decided that it would be cool to spend the 12th grade somewhere else. That is an option in the Italian school system. It is like the second-to- last year of school, you have this organization that offers you the opportunity of becoming an exchange student for a year, so I chose to come to the United States. Mainly I was very interested in the country itself—again, it was the country that had the most interesting and exciting space program and the country of Star Trek. I was also very interested in improving my knowledge of the English language, so I spent a year in a high school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then went back to Italy where I completed high school in Italy. And after that on to college. Tell me that story and how you got into the air force and ultimately to the astronaut program. I debated for a while whether I wanted to study physics or engineering. It was like my two big interests growing up were science and technology. I decided eventually to become an engineer and I decided I wanted to go to a different country just to, you know, master a different language and just to have that cultural experience. I was always extremely interested in languages and just the fact of experiencing different cultures, not so much in traveling. I mean, I like traveling, too, but I liked to find ways of actually living in a place or somehow share in the experience that the local people live. So I ended up not going very far. I went to the University of Munich in Germany and studied aerospace engineering there. It was a wonderful experience and I think a really good education. While I was there I also had the chance of participating in other programs so, for a while, I did a research project in southern France at the SUPAERO in Toulouse. And then I was always interested in Russia and, of course, I knew that Russian was a very important part of the space program, too. I had first attempted studying Russian back in high school but that had not been very successful. And then it did not look there was an exchange program between Munich and any Russian university, but then, for a twist of fate, eventually I found a professor in Italy, who actually had a good connection and a tradition of sending students to this university in Moscow, so I was able to do the research for my final thesis at the Mendeleev University in Moscow. I spent about eleven months in Moscow between 2000 and 2001. Throughout all those years I was actually thinking about this other passion that had caught my heart which was military flying. Now strangely enough, the Italian military had not accepted women until the year 2000. So in the mid-1990s you could hear talk about a law that soon will allow voluntary military service for women, but this law did not come and I was getting older and older. Normally the age limit to join the academy as a pilot is 21. So at some point I turned 21 and then I turned 22 and that law had not come. And then again, with a twist of fate, when the law finally was passed in ’99 there was a clause that said for female candidates we are going to extend the age limit by three years, so 21 became 24. That was just the fraternization period for the first three years. They wanted to help women out who had waited for so long, like me, so I was actually able to finish my engineering studies and that was that year I spent in Moscow. While I was there I also applied to the air force academy. I had to actually come back a couple of times to do part of that selection process and then basically it was back to back a big rush. So I finished my engineering studies, turned in 2 EXPEDITION 42/43 CREW INTERVIEW SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI – FLIGHT ENGINEER 5 my thesis, and almost the next day showed up at the air force academy for my studies there. In a way it was, it was not an obvious choice because in a way I was throwing away my engineering studies fully because I had to start again from scratch with colleagues that basically were out of school and, and so do undergraduate studies again, but in the end it was worth it. So I spent four years there and then went to the United States again for pilot training where I got my wings at Sheppard Air Force Base in northern Texas, which is a NATO school. Then I went back to Italy, had to wait a little bit for further training, and then I did my operational conversion on the AMX which is a single-seat light attack combat aircraft. Then for another twist of fate, pretty much at the same time as I was doing my operational conversion, which is a very, very demanding and selective training, at the same time I was going through the selection process for ESA [European Space Agency], which in a way was a pity because I was again giving up my operational career that was just starting, but in Europe we just do not have selections that often or that regularly.
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