This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 34-35 on newsstands until August 31, 2021
As a child I disassembled bicycles. Not that I was good at putting them back together, I always had a few pieces left over. But I wanted to understand how things worked ». Amalia Ercoli Finzi tells her 84 years in one sentence.
A life spent understanding, and then teaching, how the things of the world work. But above all those outside, beyond the atmosphere. First Italian graduate in Aeronautical Engineering (“At the courses we were five girls and 650 boys”) ed
former director of the aerospace engineering department at the Politecnico di Milano, for the European Space Agency he supervised the SD2 drill that on 12 November 2014 dropped off the Rosetta probe and pierced the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
“After 61 hours of waiting, five minutes before the primary battery ran out, the data came from the probe,” he recalls. “I burst into tears, we had worked on it for more than ten years“. At the time, Ercoli Finzi had already formulated the theorem (which bears his name) on the behavior of non-Newtonian fluids. Why also the asteroid 24890 Amaliafinzi if it was named after her, a few more years would have been enough. It is not
a case that, in a book dedicated to her, Tommaso Tirelli calls her “The lady of the comets “.
Before Samantha Cristoforetti, before the “dear friend” Pamela Melroy (the second astronaut who became commander of a Space Shuttle), Ercoli Finzi was already the protagonist of the human adventure beyond the sky: “When in 1957 Sputnik became the first artificial object to orbit the Earth, I was among those who listened to its
famous “beep-beep”. By a lucky coincidence, shortly after graduation the Polytechnic proposed me to take the Aerospace Mechanics course. Even then I was convinced that we would all benefit from space technologies, here on Earth ». It remained to understand how things worked. Not easy for a woman who has become a mother in the meantime
(now with five children), in a sector where budget cuts meant a stop in the production of tracksuits with women’s sizes. “Of the first spacewalk of a woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, we have a photo; the same enterprise of Aleksej Leonov and Ed White is portrayed in dozens of videos. I have never hidden that I have faced more than one difficulty due to an alleged gender weakness. “It’s not for women,” I heard myself repeat. To tell the truth, I have always defended myself, because women have a way of thinking that is complementary to the male one, which in the
space can make things much easier ».
Bridging the gender gap is a concrete attempt, as evidenced by the recent ESA call for astronauts. “So many prejudices are falling. Which does not mean, of course, that they are completely outdated. Women have more space and will have even more when, instead of being individual stars in the universe of research, they are a constellation. It is appropriate to publicly reiterate how good women are, and to do so there is nothing better than recognizing their skills in certain positions, as Samantha will reiterate
Cristoforetti becoming the first European commander of the International Space Station.
It is the message of the book I wrote with my daughter Elvina, Beyond the most distant stars (Mondadori), and is aimed at today’s girls: you can do it ». The book encourages women to do whatever they want to do. «As long as you are enthusiastic, passionate about it
and competent. Preparation is a must. How to free yourself from prejudices ». To strive beyond and not in a metaphorical sense. “Now I’m working on the first human mission to Mars. It is likely that we will get there in the second half of the 1930s. As I wrote to ESA, I predict it will be a crew of seven. Of which at least four women. Their presence will be fundamental, because we have no limits: with preparation and courage we can go anywhere. Our world is the future ». From bicycles, beyond the farthest stars.
Amalia Ercoli Finzi, 84, the first Italian graduate in Aeronautical Engineering. With his daughter Elvina he has recently published Oltre le stelle
further away (Mondadori).
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