Make room for it: women who dream of the sky

This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 34-35 on newsstands until August 31, 2021

In the summer of 1969, when the world held its breath as it watched Apollo 11 take off from Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, in the direction of Luna, in the Firing Room of the Launch Control Center there was only one woman. Today, as NASA prepares to return to our satellite with the program Artemis (launch expected in 2024), in that same control center women represent about 30% of the staff at work.

Artemis is also the mission that will bring the first astronaut to the lunar surface, thus making us forget what happened in March 2019, when the US agency announced that it had had to postpone the “female” spacewalk due to the lack of a sufficient number of medium-sized suits aboard the International Space Station.

58 years after the “debut” of the cosmonauta Valentina Tereshkova, 66 women have flown into space. And if there is an Italian who, even with her feet firmly planted on the Earth, can tell how the dream of infinity is not an exclusive for men, this is Manuela Aguzzi, born in 1977, for ten years an astronaut instructor. Aguzzi lived two lives at the European Space Agency, both terrestrial and devoted to infinity. During the first, as Astronaut Payload Instructor of the European Astronaut Center, in Cologne, he churned out most of the astronauts we know; in the second, which has just begun, he said goodbye to the training of astronauts of today to bet everything on those of tomorrow.

Born in Milan, she studied Industrial Design at the Polytechnic, with a specialization in Space Design. “At the end of the doctorate, a company in the Turin sector, l’Altec, she contacted me asking if I wanted to apply as an astronaut instructor in Cologne. It seemed like a joke …

At first, as the only woman on the team, I was a bit nervous. But behind the lessons there was a lot of preparation, a team work that erased any insecurity. I was in my comfort zone. The biggest limits, for us women, are the mental ones, the ones we impose on ourselves“. When she talked about being an astronaut trainer, many thought her job was to keep them fit. Quite the contrary: «The instructor is the link between the scientist who wants to conduct an experiment in space and the astronaut who has to perform it. It collects an enormous amount of material, perhaps the result of ten years of work by an entire research team, to rework it in a condensed lesson of one or two hours, at the end of which the astronaut will have to be able to repeat the experiment in an optimal and safe way “. A single hour of lesson is the result of an average of forty hours of study by the instructor, a test given to colleagues and a final certification: “The result is calibrated to the millimeter,
not one word more, not one less ».

The International Space Station, he explains, is made up of cylindrical modules coupled to each other. Each agency is responsible for preparing the astronauts on their own equipment, to which is added the part relating to scientific experiments. For this reason, in the last ten years, whether they were Russian, American, Japanese or European, all the astronauts assigned to carry out an experiment whose equipment was in the European module have taken a lesson at the training center in Cologne. Famous is Drain Brain, one of the key experiments of the Futura mission with the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. It was 2014 and Manuela followed that mission live, observing the launch of the Soyuz shuttle from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan: «It was night. Then the explosion, the sky brightening up… To think that Samantha was sitting there, at the height of it all, was a mix of pride, esteem and pure apprehension ». During that mission it also took shape An the snail in orbit, a children’s book that tells of a snail that finds itself on board the ISS together with the Italian astronaut: “The idea for the book was born chatting with Samantha before the launch: she liked the idea of ​​transmitting to the very small her fascination with space, and when she left I updated her on the development of the story, of which she wrote the preface upon her return ».

The European Space Agency has recently concluded the phase of collecting applications for the astronauts who will work in orbit around the Earth, on the Moon and, who knows, on Mars in the coming years. The previous batch (from which both Cristoforetti and Luca Parmitano were selected, among others) dated back to 2008. The feeling is that, within a few years, a female astronaut will no longer be such an extraordinary thing: “I think that For some time now, ESA has been paying particular attention to values ​​such as integration, minorities, gender equality ». Not surprisingly, this latest announcement was the first to offer a chance even to astronauts with physical disabilities. The data are also encouraging on the parity front: «Looking at the numbers of the last selection, closed in June, I was surprised: in 2008, out of 8 thousand applications, there were 15.5% of women. Now, out of 22 thousand questions, we are at 24%. The signal is strong, positive. At ESA in 2017 28% of hires were women, in 2018 40% “.

The change in spatial quotas is worked on by fascinating the girls, bringing them closer as girls to Stem (the scientific-technological subjects), going to look for the brightest minds in the university classrooms. After ten years of training astronauts, Aguzzi has the opportunity to work for the Educational Office, which has projects for primary and secondary schools and for universities: «I left Cologne for Brussels and now I am an Instructional Designer for the Esa Academy. I coordinate experts from the various branches of the agency, who work to create courses for university students, so as to facilitate the training of a future workforce for the agency. As a girl I would have loved to have taken such courses. To a student who dreams of this life and finds no support around her, I ask to overcome fear, to dare. It is necessary to know how to maintain the trajectory, to go beyond one’s limits. It does not matter what the starting point of each is, the important thing is to go beyond ».

Come back to mind Proxima, by Alice Winocour, which Aguzzi supported in the preparation phase: a French film, with Eva Green in the role of an aerospace engineer who is offered the opportunity to leave for a mission in space. The parable of the plot is clear: can a woman be a good mother and at the same time an astronaut determined to travel beyond the atmosphere? “If from a psychological point of view a woman manages to overcome fears, innate feelings of guilt and mental patterns that still exist in society, with motivation and determination she will reach everywhere”. Even to touch the infinite.

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