The International Space Station, the United States and now Europe: Thomas Pesquet’s return journey has just ended. The astronaut landed in good shape Tuesday night in Cologne, Germany, hours after his successful landing off the coast of Florida, which ended his second in-orbit mission.
” I’m very good ! I had a few hours to recover from the landing which went very well, ”the Frenchman told reporters on the tarmac at Cologne airport, before joining the European Astronaut Center where the await three weeks of rehabilitation to Earth’s gravity.
After a flight of several hours from the United States, Thomas Pesquet walked out, without assistance, from the medical plane chartered by the French Army. He appeared all smiles, applauded by a few fans. He nevertheless felt “still a little heavy” after a six-month stay in zero gravity. “There, I will not be able to run a 100 meters,” he said.
“We get used to it very quickly”
For the 43-year-old astronaut, the return was “less hard” than the first time, in 2017 in the steppes of Kazakhstan. “I’m in better shape than at the same stage 4 years ago,” said the man for whom the landing was a first. “We get used to gravity very quickly”, “we are really terrestrial animals made to live here,” observed Thomas Pesquet, who has just spent 199 days in weightlessness.
With his other teammates from the International Space Station, he landed on Tuesday at dawn in the Gulf of Mexico, aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. “The landing is different, we took advantage of it a little more because we had larger windows, we saw the gases ionized by the deceleration and atmospheric friction, it became all pink, it was really spectacular”, he said.
Desires for “earthly foods”
What struck him first, when he got out of his capsule at sea? “The smells of the people who came to pick us up: they smelled super good of laundry and soap, which means that we didn’t necessarily smell very good…”, joked the astronaut. His first desires? “A good shower, earthly foods, a good night’s sleep in a good bed” … and “a vacation”.
The astronaut will first have to follow a physical rehabilitation program at the center of the European Space Agency (ESA), where he was recruited in 2009. He will also undergo scientific samples in order to contribute to the collection of data on the effect of micro-gravity on the human body. And after ? The astronaut does not hide his future ambitions for the Moon. “It is true that there has never been a European, but the most exciting thing would not be just to go back there to plant a flag but to go there for scientific reasons”.